


Kingfisher, Sound The Alarm

by captainjackspearow



Series: Doing What Must Be Done [2]
Category: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Video Game)
Genre: Emotionally Constipated Adults learn to talk about their feelings, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Local Shinobi realizes he cares about a lot of people actually, M/M, Post-Return Ending but amended due to Return being Too Fucking Sad, Quasi Slow Burn, Recovery, Return Ending, See previous work in series for content warnings, Spoilers for Purification and Severance, What If We Sparred Oh No Wait I Hope This Doesn't Awaken Anything In Me, Wolf Has Two Hands, they actually get together in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:22:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22220998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainjackspearow/pseuds/captainjackspearow
Summary: “My father tried to kill me twice. And before that…” Wolf trails off. “I don’t have much in the way of positive examples of parenting.”Genichiro raises his eyebrows. “And my grandfather left me to die when I outlived my utility. The only difference between us there is that mine didn’t give enough of a shit to wield the sword himself, when he felt it was ‘appropriate.’ Poor Emma had to kill two of them for us.”His voice is weak. “I did offer.”“For someone who once gave me a whole speech about acting like a tool, you really have trouble letting go of that, don’t you?”***The journey west is neither quick, nor easy. They all have much to learn along the way. Immortality may be severed, but the weight of it still hangs around their necks, like the echo of iron shackles.Five orphans march halfway across a continent, learn to live with each other, learn to live with themselves.
Relationships: Emma/Sekiro | Wolf, Genichiro Ashina/Emma, Genichiro Ashina/Sekiro | Wolf, Sekiro | Wolf/Genichiro Ashina/Emma
Series: Doing What Must Be Done [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599427
Comments: 12
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, imagine posting a follow up fic a solid 7-8 months later. I had part of this written not too long after the first piece. Thanks to AO3 user Vigils, whose like, essay-long comments on the first fic lit the fire under me to actually finish this.
> 
> The first piece was a far more structured character study - this is a bit more hodgepodge, but is, essentially, a follow up covering the duration of and conclusion of the group's journey in this amended Return ending. Likely will not make sense without reading "Do What Must Be Done," but to each their own.
> 
> Please check the first fic for content warnings. This piece goes slightly more into detail on how what happened to Tomoe impacted Emma and Genichiro, but there are no flashbacks to that scene, nor do people describe the moment. A couple scenes in the first chapter are also probably not for the extremely *extremely* emetophobic, though nothing really approaching the Fromsoftware Experience.
> 
> Title is from "Kingfisher" by Joanna Newsom, which is a weird and fascinating song that I wholeheartedly recommend.

They flee through the mountains, like ghosts in the night.

The old, rotting idols still hold fast, glowing softly for Wolf alone, who knows how to use them to relocate the group from place to place, for Orangutan showed him their secrets. It’s a good thing he did, since the Ministry now combs Ashina for at least three of them, perhaps four, and the presumed corpse of the fifth.

Immortality calls, even cradled as it is, to those who’d burn the province to the ground to get their way. The children will not be safe here. Wolf is a known agent. Emma, too, is a vestige of the old government due to her constant place at Isshin’s side.

Genichiro, should they discover him, is as good as dead. Isshin’s heir – a military commander, at that – will undoubtedly be put to the blade to snuff out any flames of rebellion within the province.

He could take them as far west as Hirata before they flee on foot, but it’s the first place the Ministry will search for most of them. They’re all familiar faces to what few inhabitants survived the massacre three years prior, with the exception of the girl. So instead, they climb down the northern half of Mount Kongo, towards the burning fields. 

There are other battles, other lords, other Ashinas. They must cross through several, to make it to the coast.

More wars, more corpses, more burning hatred and starving children. But for now, they will live, and they will carry the children west.

***

The true Divine Heir – Kuro – has never seen the mountain before. He marvels as they creep forth, staring wide-eyed at the leaves of the trees, at the vines that curl around the old forsaken statuary, at the tiny purple flowers that bloom between the cracked stone.

Every small wonder he points out cuts deeper, for – but she cannot fault him for this – his existence is what kept her from these stones, this mountain.

But they clamber forth, huddled together between the doctor, who holds the rear, and the general, who smells wrong, even still, like wet clay and rot. He still pauses to quietly cough sediment every so often, a deep red that might, by one less trained, be mistaken solely for the blood mixed within it.

Does he fault her, for that?

Sekiro scouts ahead, no longer invulnerable but unwilling to lay down his burden of responsibility. He leaps from branch to branch, she notes to her amusement, more like a monkey, not a wolf.

But the two of them shuffle along, hopping over rocks with unpracticed limbs, trying to keep pace with the others, when it happens.

Kuro apologizes.

She is not certain what the apology is for, because he does not immediately elaborate. For what his existence put her through? For the decision she made on his behalf, or the burden she bears even now, also on his behalf? For all of it? For something else altogether?

She does not know how to respond, either, but only to say – you did not choose this either.

But Kuro shakes his head, short hair sticking to his face in the humid air of the mountain pass, and says, “I am alive because you chose to sacrifice much. In spite of what my existence has inflicted upon you.”

“It could have been anyone’s existence.”

He blinks, confusion settling in, and she continues.

“If it was not you, born as you were, somebody else’s existence would have done the same when they inherited the dragon’s heritage. It is not your existence that inflicted such things upon me,” she says, voice catching slightly as the general coughs again, a deep one this time, “though, perhaps, I once attributed them to you, and it is sometimes difficult to look at you and not remember.”

Kuro nods. “It is likewise difficult, sometimes, to look at you and not remember also what was done for the sake of all of this.”

Sekiro whistles ahead to indicate the path is clear, and she turns to see him gently shoo a friendly monkey away from the trail. “I’m just… I’m glad you had – I’m glad for Sekiro. I wonder, sometimes, Kuro, what it would have been like, had I had someone like him at my side.”

The color drains from his face, eyes wide with a flash of sudden fear and recollection, and she realizes she has said something very wrong. “I apologize-”

“-it isn’t that, it’s just…” Kuro’s voice is quiet. “I know Wolf has done much for me, and I would- his loyalty is something I could never have asked for.”

(She realizes then, that what he truly means is _“and I didn’t.”_ )

He pauses before continuing, sliding down the other side of a rock, “I know what you meant is that perhaps it would have been nice to not be alone, but Wolf was not free to choose his path.”

She shakes her head. “I think, perhaps, it would have been nice to _be_ alone.”

To have gone through it alone would have been an undue burden, true, but at least no others would have-

But they did suffer, they did die, it is done and there’s no changing that. All they can do now is rush towards the sea under what cover they can find to stop it from happening again.

Kuro, she discovers, knows what it’s like to be torn between guilt and companionship. As they trudge onwards, muddy and free, he tells her the story of why they couldn’t go back to Hirata, couldn’t run from there.

How he was coerced into making his pact to save Sekiro’s life. How the whole massacre – the senseless loss of life – was a ploy, another failed gambit to take the bloodline by force. How he does not know what to do with the lingering guilt, though he owes everything to him – to all of them, but to Sekiro above all, even in spite of this.

And they watch Sekiro as Kuro speaks, dutifully cutting a path, scouting thoughtfully even now, like he cannot fathom living solely for himself, and both decide: perhaps we all need to figure out how to do so.

(Even Emma, who quickly rushes over as the general outright stops to heave into the bushes. Even the general, who stands, shuddering, over a pile of blood-red clay, sweaty hand pressed to a still-healing wound on his neck.)

To learn to live with the guilt. To live with ourselves. To pick up the pieces.

***

The shinobi’s – Wolf’s, Genichiro reminds himself – insistence that they keep to themselves for the sake of throwing off pursuers means they skirt most of the towns on the way to the sea. But ultimately, everyone agrees they’ll have to stop in a port city on the northwest coast to secure supplies and food, and if they’re lucky, sea passage.

The cover he and Emma come up with for them is based mostly in truth. He is a high-ranking military official, Ashina is burning, and he got out while he still could. Wolf is the bodyguard to his wife and children, since this will allow Emma and him to do most of the talking, and it’s clear to all of them that Wolf is no actor.

(He almost asks if Wolf was ever trained to be, but thinks better of it.)

To improvise with a blade is one thing, but words are another matter altogether, and it’s clear Wolf has little skill – or practice – in that regard.

Somehow, though, the man managed to stash away enough coin on his person over the past several months to bribe practically anyone they might need to look the other way – at least for the night they plan to stay – so he contributes effectively enough.

The Divine Heir (or not, he should stop calling him that, Genichiro supposes, because he _isn’t,_ not anymore) looks confused, but Wolf shrugs, ambivalent. “In case we had to make a quick getaway. Good to know it came in handy.”

False names are easy, for three of them, should they need it. The Divine Child of the Rejuvenating Waters could use her own, because the Ministry may not even know of her existence, but they quickly realize that won’t be possible.

She was taken too young to remember it.

“Just pick one,” he says. “I could give you five. Emma could give you plenty. You could use hers, even – they’re looking for a much older Emma than you-”

“Yao,” Wolf chimes in.

They all turn to stare.

He pulls out a small swatch of cloth, a gold brocade, stained and bloodied. The pattern reminds him of old robes – the other heir used to wear similarly bright designs, when he sat and watched Tomoe beat him into the dirt with training swords-

“I met a priestess, who I think once served the dragon. It was her name. I didn’t know her well, but she was a strong fighter.”

Tomoe used to tell tales of Fountainhead Spiral, of the priestess-guard who held the entrance and exit fast, like some childhood fairy story.

“She was devoted to her duty well enough not to let the corruption of Mibu spread to the Fountainhead, nor the depravity within extend to the world below the mountain.”

The girl takes the fabric, turning it over in cold hands, and hums.

“You can change it later,” Genichiro finds himself saying. “It’s just an idea. You need a cover.”

  
But she doesn’t, not really – the innkeeper never even asks for a name that isn’t his own. The only question he asks, as he slides over a small bag of Wolf’s coin, isn’t even phrased as one. Just a statement, as Emma, to her credit, ushers both children along to wash up, with Wolf at her side, sparing him a cursory, uncertain glance.

The old man counts the sen, nodding to the kids, and says, snidely, “You must have been a young father, to have children so old.”

He could have meant it in jest, and perhaps the old bastard was just poking fun, but _shit,_ it rubs him the wrong way after everything they’ve seen, and he replies, quite strictly, that the kids are victims of war.

But all of them hold a duty to the children that fall into their lives, nonetheless, do they not?

“Generals make plenty of war orphans,” says the innkeeper flatly, signing off on his payment.

He takes the receipt. “I never chose to be one.”

***

Genichiro and Emma return from town not too long after Kuro and the Divine Child finish washing up. Medicine wasn’t too difficult to procure, a comfortable stockpile of dried food was harder, but most importantly, one of the ships in the harbor is actually slated to leave for the mainland in the morning. Somehow (probably due, in no small part, to the majority of Wolf’s coin) the pair of them managed to talk their way into passage for the lot of them.

The room itself is a nice change of pace from camping on the mountainside. Wolf is used to sleeping rough, doesn’t mind it at all at this point, but Kuro isn’t, and it is, granted, nice to wash up a little.

Wolf doesn’t mind the floor. He really doesn’t.

“Wolf, this is ridiculous. Please, we can make room for you quite easily, or you can have my place-”

“Kuro,” Emma says, “go to sleep. I’ll make certain he doesn’t sleep on the floor.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, but Emma glares right back. “We’ve all slept in worse conditions than these, Wolf. There’s no point in making ourselves miserable when there’s no need, now. At least come sit here, for the time being.”

He hates that she has a point.

Wolf’s caught what few hours of sleep he could permit himself on bare floors and curled between roots, on blood-stained battlefields and in broken buildings. He knows little of Genichiro still, but he does know the man has lived as a soldier, spending the most luxurious period of his life on bedrolls in tents or curled up in fields, bleeding. Emma has slept at the foot of makeshift cots, alone in still-smoldering forests.

Kuro has slept in hundreds of strange beds, he knows. He heard Divine Child of Rejuvenation sob herself into unconsciousness, sprawled across the floor of a desecrated temple. 

But even so, knowing this, there is something that feels dangerous about the prospect of lying together, the three of them on a soft mattress in a warm room. Uncomfortably so, even.

So instead, he sits at the futon’s edge as they watch the kids quickly succumb to the exhaustion of the past couple weeks. He’s glad they get along, in-person, for he was a little worried. There’s still a palpable tension that he’s not sure will ever fully fade, but the two have reached a strange peace for the time being. Or at least, a temporary understanding.

For the second time, now, they sit together, the three of them, and watch the children sleep.

(They do not do so soundly. It hurts – claws at a piece of him he doesn’t want to look at yet – to imagine that they probably never have.)

One of the others – he forgets which – asks Wolf if Kuro has always slept so roughly.

He nods as Kuro turns over again, the third time in the past minute, and says, “Did you not notice?” Genichiro had him for months, locked up. Emma was there, in Ashina Castle. Intermittently, perhaps, but she was _there._ How could they have not?

Emma nods, eyes distant and melancholy, and he softens, because he knows she was kept away from the boy, they’re old wounds, he doesn’t want to deal with that right now.

(Genichiro shivers to realize that, in those foolish months, desperate as he was, _he did not care._ )

So, instead, Wolf shakes his head, tells them softly to never mind it, asks Emma if she needs help with the new bandages on her arms.

The burns are still bad to look at – a patchwork of torn skin and broken blisters, red and angry, beneath the dressing she’d applied. It’s a far cry from the unmarred hands he was used to watching worry over the Sculptor: dry and chapped, from long hours with patients and poultices, not once idling.

They don’t look like Genichiro’s either, as the other man follows her directions in crushing herbs to replace those they use, calloused from constantly gripping sword handles and bowstrings, streaked with raised scar tissue from his less traditional training. Nor his own – he would never want it like that, he thinks, as he gently wraps clean cloth around her wounded wrist and forearm - because his were scarred too, the fight was beaten into them until it was all they knew, and one clicks with the uncanny sound of bone scraping bone as the carved joints slide together, binding the bandage. He smooths the fabric down with the other – the flesh hand, the one he can still feel, to be certain it isn’t too rough or out of place – and Emma inhales softly, and he’s struck by the sudden tenderness of the moment. Perhaps it’s the proximity, the casual manner, the fact that the room is nearly dark, but for the small glimpse of moonlight just barely breaking through the cloud cover to shine through the small window. But her eyes hurt in a way that feels cutting and deep and not entirely painful as they remain fixed on his face, which he keeps firmly downcast, for fear of-

-he almost wants to kiss her, to press his lips to the edges of the still-tender burns on her face, the sensitive skin there. Wants the sturdy, calloused hand on his shoulder – he’s staring at him too, Wolf can _feel_ it – to grip him tighter where he holds him as he’s paused to watch him work. He wants to insert himself into whatever the pair of them seemed to have before he got here, if there was anything at all, before.

But he does not know how, because he never needed to. Wanting things for himself was always out of the question.

***

He’s gotten them all onto the ship, spinning the same lie as before with the aid of the clatter of sen, but once the wind is in the sails, it doesn’t matter anymore whether the crew buys their story or not. He and Wolf can wield a weapon well enough – and they haven’t been shy about wearing them, for the explicit purpose of making this clear – that questions go unasked. As much as Emma resents her upbringing as a knife in the shadows, it’s… reassuring to know that she, too, can defend herself if need be.

But the palpable relief at setting sail he’d hoped to piggyback off of from the other members of their traveling party is distinctly absent. The relief is there, undoubtedly so, because even _he_ feels it and he’s not even being properly chased. He’d have to have been presumed dead after he jumped, and the ministry wouldn’t bother wasting time on something with so little payoff.

No. The Divine Heir, it turns out, spends most of the first day aboard _criminally_ seasick. And this, Genichiro notes, puts a bit of a damper on their successful getaway.

It makes as much sense as anything else, he supposes. It took Emma the better part of three days to get his fever to a manageable state for travel, after everything. Mortality is new to him. Feeling ill is undoubtedly new. Even Takeru never so much as caught a damn cold.

So, nausea? Also new. And he can’t fault the boy for that, even as much as he’d like to, because he’d only been on boats at most a handful of times himself, and never on the open sea, never mind in wind like this.

He doesn’t mind the foul weather, to be honest. Emma had a little time, while they were holed up in that strange place within Senpou, to make more of that herbal ointment for his newer, poorly treated lightning scars, so the shifting humidity hurts far less than it has over the past couple months. Wolf seems torn about it, though, because on one hand, like Genichiro, he’s a practical man. The ministry is less likely to pursue them through a storm if they’ve gotten wind of their whereabouts, particularly to the mainland, where trade is scarce and government officials almost entirely unwelcome, so the weather could buy them days, even weeks if they’re lucky. But on the other, the man is as closed a book as it gets when it comes to his emotions, but not when it comes to the-

-to Kuro, he supposes. No use using the title, anymore. Not when it’s clear he’s _not_ , and every roll of the ship makes him cling to the rails.

Wolf’s face is warped with uncharacteristic concern for the majority of the day, and his wide-eyed fear is throwing Genichiro off. Emma helps as best she can, passing off medical assistance as maternal affection, which is the only reason their cover isn’t entirely blown, but it does mean he doesn’t have much of a chance to properly speak to the pair of them.

They had a little time to talk, in Senpou. He knows he owes the boy a proper apology, and he’s not certain how he’d begin to sift through the muddled history of wounds between him and the shinobi. But a few words will not make up for six months of imprisonment, will not repair an arm, and, likewise, a few words will not remove the raised scar from his abdomen, the perfect puncture left by Wolf’s blade.

But he has Emma, who for some reason refused to hold these things against either of them. Genichiro isn’t certain why, but he wonders, as she now kneels by Kuro, fussing over ginger and some other mixture made from powdered herbs, hair still slightly uneven where they cut the burnt pieces off, if it’s because she would have done the same.

The second night in Senpou, after Wolf insisted she get some sleep and took point on the children, Emma leant against his shoulder, burnt cheeks warm against bare skin, and murmured that she regretted nearly killing the man.

He just ran fingers through her hair as she spilled everything – the eavesdropping, the fear, the spark of darkness that Owl (and, Genichiro fears, he _too_ ) left in Wolf’s eyes. How she was half a second from stepping out, blade in hand. How she wasn’t certain how much of Shura was in the older man. How she feared finding the same in him.

And, like a fool, he’d snickered at that, trying not to think about the burn in his eyes, on his cheeks, and told her that she should have been more concerned about him in the field, in that case.

(Or in the castle’s dojo. Could he have hurt, killed, if she’d stood in his way? If she had turned on him, would he have?)

But Emma just shook her head, and said, “you didn’t hate like he did.”

“I was a mess.”

“You never hurt the boy. If you were really- If you were going to become that, you would have.”

“I…” He couldn’t respond to that, because he _did,_ he could have killed him for spite alone in the silvergrass fields, he _ached_ for it, he can still feel the residual chills of the anger coursing through his body-

But she grabbed him by the wrist, fingers that strange sort of new-skin soft, and said, “ _You never did it,”_ and her eyes were too intense, the same incredible muted brown that’s always unnerved him, since they were younger, and it’s not _fair,_ he wanted to-

-he wants so many things, and he deserves none of them.

Fingertips tracing his cheekbones startle him out of his thoughts, and a different type of ache takes root deep in his chest, _burning,_ like her solemn, melancholy expression. He shivers as the pad of a thumb brushes his lower lip, what is she- “ _Emma.”_

And she pulls away, and he’s both thankful and cannot bear it one moment longer, but-

“Come with us.”

There is nothing left for him here. “I owe you all that much, and more besides.”

But Emma shakes her head, softly leaning it against his shoulder. “I don’t want you to do this out of obligation alone. I’ve missed you.”

“You have them.” Because she does, and she did – the whole time in Ashina.

“It would have cut so deeply if you’d died too. You or Wolf. I don’t want to lose anyone else, and especially not like _that_.” She shivers as she speaks, and he can feel a chill run through his bones at the implication, who she _did_ lose like that, and he doesn’t want to follow that line of conversation, so he deflects the only way he knows how-

“Lucky for you, we didn’t. He’s fine. You’re fine.”

“I can care for multiple people, can I not?”

So, he came. Because, as he’s realized, she can. _He_ can, as he watches the pair of them tend to the boy curled against the edge of the ship, both far stronger than him, raised in similar circumstances, but given far different burdens, in the aftermath of the first coup.

Weighed down by those burdens in far different ways, in the aftermath of the second.

At least Emma’s able to help. At least he’s not on vomit duty.

He minds the other Divine Child instead, who watches the scene with thinly veiled vexation through uncanny yellow eyes as the sailors around them prep the rigging for the storm’s shift. She’s been disgruntled all day, he’d noticed, but for some reason this bout of seasickness – or perhaps it’s the boy, he’d heard of their history – chafes at her.

So Genichiro takes a seat on the rain-slick steps, just below eye level. Might as well commiserate with a kindred spirit, or at the very least, make himself useful. “Storm bothering you too, or just Kuro today?” 

“I’d thought about it in theory, General Genichiro, but he truly has never known illness, has he?” she says. “Nor, with it, pain. Not until now.”

He furrows his brow, and she scowls at the implication of disagreement – and that’s not it, it’s just, he’d been to Senpou, he’d heard the stories, he knew how they _made her,_ and she so clearly _has_ known illness and pain, far worse than simple seasickness. But it would be impolite to remind her, even in sympathy, and so as he shakes his head, cutting her assumption off as best he can, and simply says, “I was simply thinking how alike we are. The two of us.”

She doesn’t know about the silvergrass fields. About the dragonrot and resentment he held because of it. But a ship full of eavesdropping strangers isn’t the place for such open discussion.

“I can vouch, though – the boy has known pain. I inflicted a portion of it myself. And not all is physical.”

If he were any less adept at reading people, he would have missed the slight roll of her eyes. “It’s not the same.”

“I never said it was.”

She wipes a strand of wet hair from her face from where it’s slipped down towards her eyes. “Speaking of similarities… how are your lungs, General Genichiro?”

“Don’t call me that, please. But they are healing.”

Healing is a word for it. It’s true, he’s no longer leaning against moss-slimy trees, hacking up a mess of sediment out of sight from the others as best he can, nor finally sweating out the fever that’s dogged his heels since the second duel – the first death – as they press onwards. No longer leaving the room in the night so he doesn’t wake the others with the deep, pained coughs that began plaguing him in Senpou Temple, after they tore whatever parasitic immortality dwelled within the boy out of him and fucked _him_ up as a side effect. No longer failing to do so, looking up instead from where he’s hunched over a pile of bloody mud, still-sputtering, to see small yellow eyes blinking at him like she’s not sure if she’s dreaming or not.

“And,” he continues, taking a deep breath for good measure, to prove to them both that he _can_ , “I do agree with you – the boy is soft in some ways, I completely agree.”

“Soft in ways,” he says, pausing to look properly at the girl who not long ago looked at him, keeled over in the corner of the temple, hacking up mud and congealed _something_ like she knew exactly what it felt like, “that we were never really allowed to be.”

The Divine Child nods, tired and bleary-eyed, and it just occurs to him-

“Are you feeling okay?”

She shrugs. “Only a stomachache, but I’m used to such things.”

He hopes his nod isn’t too awkward. “Let me know if you’d like me to ask Emma for something for you. It would be no trouble.”

But Genichiro can’t stop thinking on what Wolf told them about the girl, what happened to her within the inner sanctum of Senpou, of the corruption curling just under the skin of her captors there, the horror he himself witnessed on his visits. If it felt like that for her, too, when they made her what she was – like coughing one’s organs out through both nose and mouth. It was probably far worse, in her case. His heart aches, and not in a good way, and he wonders what she must think of him, for being willing to co-opt the false Dragon’s Heritage that the monks forced upon her, couched in all that pain and suffering.

How she can seemingly handle him the best of the four, in spite of it.

***

It is very late that evening by the time they manage to get everyone settled. It might even be pushing into the early hours of the next day – Wolf can’t be certain, for the storm is still going strong, and there is no telltale starlight by which to measure time amidst the heavy cloud cover.

The cabin Genichiro paid for with his coin is, Wolf supposes, much better than he expected they’d get, for passage out of the country. The merchant ship undoubtedly is used to carrying paying passengers in the berth, though not in this direction. They’d gotten exceedingly lucky.

Emma sits on the small bed, tucking away a tiny pot of salve in her satchel where she’s laid it by the bedside. Genichiro sits up from where he’s laying as Wolf enters, the scars on his upper body exposed where he’s removed his shirt for Emma look them over, gauge how they’ve healed.

Wolf clears his throat. “Kuro’s finally asleep.”

It is interesting how, in such a short time, the relief he felt but a moment before upon seeing Kuro’s eyes finally close for the night is shared by the others. A piece of him would love to stay, to chat, but it feels a bit too much as if he’s intruding on something private despite the night before, despite their proximity at Senpou, despite their accompanying him on a journey that really, they had no obligation towards.

“There’s a hammock set up in the other berth,” he murmurs as he points behind him, past the door down the hall, “I’ll just-”

But Emma shakes her head, and beckons for him to come join them on the small cabin bed. He’s half uncertain why he follows, climbing awkwardly onto the scratchy sheets. It is uncomfortably close, so much so that he can smell the medicated salve she’s been using to treat their scars (it’s on the both of them, Emma’s hands, Genichiro’s entire _torso_ ), that he can hear the way Genichiro’s breath hitches when each peal of thunder strikes, outside, on the sea.

Or perhaps it’s the proximity, he thinks, as he turns to look, shifting against the both of them, to see the general’s eyes trace the line of his own jaw, pupils blown wide.

_Oh,_ Wolf thinks.

“ _Wolf_ ,” Genichiro starts, his voice barely above a whisper.

“ _Sekiro,_ ” he interrupts. “Or, well, I don’t know anymore. I should decide which one. Why are you staring at me like that?”

Genichiro turns away, hissing quietly as he pulls at a wound on his ribs, the motion too sharp. He does not answer, but something needling within his own gut can’t let this go, “Why are you staring at me like-”

“Because I-” He’s not looking anymore, eyes firmly trained towards the portside window, towards the clouds, away from the both of them. “I hate you. I don’t know what to do with you, and I hate it. And a part of me wants to.”

_Wants to what?_ Wolf wants to ask. No – not ask – he wants to pull the answer from the man's mouth, tear it from his lungs, after everything that’s happened over the last year and a bit. He understands the confusion though, because the same feeling haunts him.

He should hate him. But they were close to the same at the start, put forth on two different paths by two different monsters in the guises of men, so perhaps, in a kinder world, he wouldn’t have.

Now, both men are dead, and he’s in a ship berth fleeing the country only because the man before him knows how to lie convincingly to other people.

But he remembers the pain of a blade sinking deep into the meat of his arm, what it felt like when his humerus cracked and split, tearing from the rest of what was still anchored to his shoulder, the screaming of the nerves and the phantom fingers burning. What it felt like to run kusabimaru through his gut, the smell of sweat and blood and something worse and the sensation of flesh splitting under his fingers. The feral, desperate look in the man’s eyes, both times.

Did his own eyes look the same?

He’s not sure how long he’s waited to respond – perhaps only a few seconds, maybe longer, but he doesn’t realize it until Emma props herself up on her elbows to give them both an exhausted look. Her dark hair brushes the edge of his arm where it hangs down below her shoulders. She’d had to cut her hair a little shorter after the flames singed the ends.

It suits her beautifully.

But her voice is gentle, with a lilting tone to it that suggests amusement of some sort. He’s glad she’s finding some in all this, but-

“It’s because you’re a handsome man.”

Oh. Wolf’s brain stops in its tracks, like _he_ was the one hit by the last peal of thunder to sound outside, instead of the land behind them, the water, wherever it struck.

“What are we doing?” he asks, because he suddenly isn’t sure, because he desperately wants to know if he's reading this right.

“Nothing,” Emma says, eyes still unflinchingly fixed on his own, “unless either of you would like to. But you _are_ a handsome man-”

“-not what I meant,” Wolf cuts in.

Emma smiles, warm and suddenly not teasing at all. “And a good one, at that. And,” she turns towards Genichiro, resting a hand on his hip that, Wolf notices, he does _not_ immediately flinch away from, “I am so glad, my friend, that you, too, are alive. I meant what I said earlier – I do not want to think about what it would have been like to have lost you as well.”

“What,” Genichiro says, voice laced with something biting, a pained sort of sarcasm, “I’m not handsome?”

“You’re very handsome,” Emma says, and Wolf snorts at that, but the moment the sound leaves his mouth calloused hands shove him away, back against Emma, for laughing like a petulant teenager but it’s funny, because how can he not see?

So, he shoves Genichiro right back, and finds the muscle beneath his arms is firm and strong, covered by a thick patchwork of scars from blades and lightning and it’s suddenly too much, the heat of Emma’s body against his back, the tight grip Genichiro has on his undershirt, and finally, _finally,_ something unravels inside of his chest, within his gut.

He cannot help but want to be held, to be touched more, when it is like this. By people who seem to understand.

And so, he twists, rolling in Genichiro’s grip onto his back, and pulls Emma down onto his right side with his remaining arm and clumsily presses his lips to hers.

Emma kisses with a gentle urgency, like she’s afraid he’ll disappear if she lets go of him. But the fist in his shirt tightens and the man he once killed tugs him away, and his eyes are no longer red but they are just as dangerously intense.

Genichiro does not kiss like Emma does. There is a harshness to how he moves his lips, a fervent desperation, unwieldy but almost electric. 

It is all overwhelming after that, for a while. His hands trace their bodies – he feels the warmth of Emma’s skin with his own calloused fingers, curls bony ones around Genichiro’s hip. The both of them are just as covered in scars as he is, and Wolf finds so _many_ of them. The still-healing burns that line Emma’s arms and face. The lightning-marks, startling black and dull crimson both, that run even down the plane of Genichiro’s chest, to his core. The shadows of old sword wounds from their duel in the silvergrass, in the dojo. The new ones from their final fight. The killing blow.

The muscle around all Genichiro’s old scars, that’s wasted away somewhat over the past couple months of desperate survival. The muscle on Emma, too, which has not, but is sensitive beneath layers of new skin, now grown over from the more easily-treatable burns. Faint traces of childhood burns, too, curl across her body like lightning marks Genichiro’s, stretching and distorting where the skin grew over the years.

Fingers reach across his own skin as well, and he shudders at the sensation of so many hands. They likewise linger on his many scars – Emma on the ones she recalls stitching up, back in the Abandoned Temple, or in Senpou, the ones he survived well enough to bring to her attention, while Genichiro-

Genichiro presses a heavy hand into the meat of his bad shoulder, and he hisses, but curious fingers trail downward with a guilty curiosity, running along the sensitive edge where the bone joins to skin, the scar-line that he left himself, and then the lips on his throat are gone, replaced with a ragged voice in his ear.

_“Does it still hurt?”_

Wolf moans.

Somewhere amidst the jumble of warm mouths and hands and knees and _friction,_ he finally remembers the question he’d wanted to ask before this, but forgotten.

“Do you do this often?”

He’s never seen Emma flush quite like she does in that moment. “No. We’ve never-”

It’s enough of an answer, so he returns immediately back to what he was doing with renewed focus. The both of them are so responsive like this – Emma can’t stifle all noises against his neck as he reaches for her, and Genichiro, damn him, is so focused on eliciting a reaction from him, competitive even in this, too.

Gods, none of them know what they’re doing, really, do they? But he’s too far gone to even care, he thinks, too drunk on contact and eyes that look like they give a shit to give one of his own, and then all thoughts of unresolved histories, all jumbled emotions are thrown off as someone slides a hand beneath his waistband and he groans at the feeling of it-

Someone is pacing the halls, their footsteps are- but it doesn’t matter. He’s close. He’s _so_ close, he can almost-

-that sound. It’s too rhythmic to be people walking about. _Fuck._

_“The door,”_ he chokes out, as blunt teeth sink into his neck and the hand on him continues to move in spite of what he just said, and he pulls away, because it’s _knocking,_ which can only mean-

“Sekiro?”

The moment crashes. Genichiro swears and moves to get up, but Wolf just shakes his head, stifling a groan, and untangles himself from the other two bodies.

“I apologize,” the young girl says through the door, “if I disturbed your rest, but Kuro woke, and he’s been ill again.”

He can feel Emma rising on the bed behind him, but he just shakes his head, shoves himself back into his pants, and throws a shirt on. This isn’t their job.

And he shouldn’t have been in here in the first place, when he’s responsible for more than himself.

The door shuts, wordlessly, behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For everyone who does not know that I am liable to go apeshit over the Corrupted Monk every five seconds, Priestess Yao made a lot of sense to me as a potential yet ultimately ill-fitting namesake on a couple levels.
> 
> After all, she's immortal, and what's more, torn between the two types of immortality in the game, the snake and the centipede, much in the way that the Divine Child is, if you go for the Return ending. It's fitting on that level, but also because she, like the Divine Child, very much devoted herself to doing the right thing. She held the line against the Fountainhead nobles. She held the line against Mibu. Wolf can see a kindred spirit in her.
> 
> Ultimately, however, I came up with a better idea, and also, I do think the Monk's willing service to the dragon for so long would have rubbed the girl the wrong way, in the end.


	2. Chapter 2

The hammocks are decidedly smaller than the bed in the other berth. But they are just large enough for Wolf to sit at one side with Kuro curled in on himself on the other.

Distraction can kill in battle, but when it comes to withstanding pain, Wolf knows there is often nothing better. And it’s really the only tool left in his arsenal at this point – Emma’s done what she could for him, but some aspects of life aren’t curable.

“Perhaps,” he says, softly, “it is good to be able, at least, to feel such things now. Though of course, it is not easy, and I would never wish pain upon you.”

Kuro nods, and agrees. He looks so small, lying here. Wolf isn’t sure why – he’s watched the young Lord since he was an infant, but now his pain is almost contagious. Perhaps it’s because such familiar feelings are so new to him.

“Could we speak of something else, Wolf?” he asks. “I no longer want to think about the lolling of the ship or the storm outside. I do not think such things agree with me any longer.”

“We can speak of whatever you’d like.”

“The others came with us, even though they didn’t have to,” Kuro says, softly.

“They did,” Wolf says.

“I understand why the general might wish to do such a thing,” he murmurs, “but Emma’s motivations elude me.”

“She lost much to the pursuit of the Dragon’s Heritage too, Lord Kuro-”

“-just Kuro. _Please_ , Wolf,” the boy interrupts. “Do not make me ask again.”

“It will be a difficult habit to break.”

“I request that you try. For both our sakes. You are no longer beholden to me, Wolf, and I am no longer the bearer of anything that necessitates such formality.”

“I will make an attempt, then.”

That, at least, brings a weak smile to the boy’s face, so Wolf continues speaking, before it can disappear again with the next large wave.

“Her family was lost when Lord Takeru’s immortality was used during the previous war in Ashina, to the hatred and fear born from that violence. She watched the last attempt to do what we are now doing fail, with severe consequence. And then, the Sculptor was…” he trails off, not sure quite how to put words to what they both already know.

Kuro sighs. “It is not her burden to bear. I feel as if I am imposing it upon her.”

“Did you choose this burden either? She is here of her own free will. As are we.” Wolf inhales deeply. “We all made a decision, m- Kuro. Each of us chose to set this to rest.”

“The Divine Child of-”

“She chose this. If it helps, remember that the decision was made, in her mind, only in part for your sake. There’s also the matter of returning what was stolen.”

“This does help, Wolf.”

“Emma, likewise, is here for all of us – not just you. She is concerned for the Divine Heir of Rejuvenation’s health, and the rest of us lack her medical training. She and General Genichiro are-”

Wolf pauses. Are what? Friends?

“-are old friends. They have known each other since they were barely older than children. You, of course, are in a unique and perhaps somewhat fragile state of health, but are not the only reason she has chosen to come on this long journey.”

“What of you, Wolf?”

He looks at Kuro, who stares at him with a strange curiosity. “She has sewn me back together countless times in Ashina. She kept me from having to use what neither of us intended for you to give to me more often than I had to do so to survive.”

“So she has come to sew you back up, now that you no longer have it.”

“I can sew myself back up, but she is far more practiced at it, and skilled as well. But no, we are also… something in the way of friends.”

“That’s…” Kuro’s eyelids flutter. Wolf, for once, cannot read his half-glazed expression. “I mean no insult by this, but you don’t have many friends, Wolf.”

He sighs. “You met few of them over the past year, in Ashina. The temple brought a lot of strange outcasts together. The Sculptor was a good man, and besides him-”

(He thinks of a bloodstained blade against the other man’s throat and the swallowing of something writhing within it that took him a second too long to understand. The false tooth is cold in his own mouth even now.)

“Hanbei was a good friend. We came to understand each other well. And Emma is-”

But he does not have to figure out how to finish that sentence, how to sum up their strangely shifting relationship into simple categories he can explain to the person alive who’s known him longest, because Kuro cuts him off with a weak shake of his head.

“Wolf, you’ve never really had friends. Not in the time since I’ve known you.”

Wolf opens his mouth to protest, but Kuro continues in a voice that almost breaks his heart in two, because perhaps there’s more truth to what he’s saying than Wolf wants to willingly admit. “Neither, really, have I.”

“You’ve had me.” His own voice is quiet, because he knows it isn’t the same, but it’s as good as either of them had.

“You know it’s different, Wolf. All of that – it was different. You didn’t… it wasn’t the same.”

It’s all he can do to gently admit it, because at least the ash of the past in his mouth is sufficient distraction from the rolling of the ship, and after everything, he owes Kuro that honesty.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

About both things. That Wolf was never allowed to have friends. That their bond was one formed out of duty and proximity. It was loyalty to Kuro, or disobedience to Owl, and that was no choice at all.

But that does not mean this tie between them is not meaningful, because it is all that Wolf has of his old life that he still _wants._

“Do you… Wolf? It seems… selfish of me to say so, after everything I put you through, but I… you’re like family to me.”

He thinks of everyone he’s called such – Owl, dead in a ditch somewhere if he was lucky (if Emma even bothered), the people who bore him, dead in another ditch, because he dug it himself _,_ somewhere in the war-ravaged Ashina countryside, siblings old enough to fight in their own unmarked graves, the others-

-he thinks of everyone he’s ever considered family, cut down in the heat of war, on the battlefield and in their homes, by him or otherwise, and makes a vow never to let Kuro pick up a sword-

“Wolf?”

He thinks he can hear his own voice crack on something burning in his throat. “Family has always been – since I was a child – something of circumstance. I would be honored to be considered such by you.”

“You as good as raised me, you know.”

He did. Wolf held him in his arms as barely more than an infant, tiny and helpless and quiet _, so_ quiet, the boy refused to cry-

It was not the first infant he’d held.

Something twists in his gut at that. Maybe it’s the notion of being… being what? An older brother, again? A father?

The responsibility that trust demands of him. The fact that he even has the option to make the same mistakes- to do what Owl did.

The realization that it must have been a choice after all, because how could he look at this child and feel anything other than a desire to keep him from suffering as he already had? From the life he himself knew?

So, he nods, cracks a small and rare smile, which in turn brings a little more life to Kuro’s eyes, and says, “We go together, then. Come what may.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Kuro says, “what you’d like to do after we… after we fix this, Wolf. When all is said and done. Do you want to go back?”

“I’m not certain.” He’d never thought he was going to live to see the day they had the opportunity, he’d had that thought many times, but… that’s a poor excuse. Wolf’s simply never been much in the habit of planning his life out more than five seconds beyond the most immediate threat to him, Kuro, or his current objective.

“Do you remember how I used to sneak into the kitchens back in Hirata?”

“Yes. And I recall you finally admitting it to me not too long ago.”

“Maybe,” Kuro mentions weakly, “we could open a teahouse somewhere.”

He nods, tentatively, mulling the concept over in his head while the boy’s eyes slowly flicker shut again.

Footsteps approach the doorway. Too light to be crew, who care not how they throw their weight around, and too heavy to be the young Divine Child of Rejuvenation, who has been gone a worryingly long time.

It’s fifty-fifty odds, and Wolf is, to his surprise, wrong.

The door quietly cracks open to reveal Genichiro’s sleepy expression, much to his own confusion.

He looks to Kuro, finally asleep, looks to Wolf, lightly perched at the end of the hammock, looks to the mess all over the berth and the other empty bed.

“Anything I can do?” he asks.

Wolf can just see the shadow of dark marks beginning to form on him – beneath his pulse point, at the crook of his shoulder – and quickly pulls his own collar up slightly higher.

This is not the place to talk about whatever that was.

“Clean,” Wolf says, barely above a whisper. “Watch him. I’m going to check on the girl. She’s been gone a long time. Just be quiet, though,” because if he wakes Kuro with the noise after everything-

He doesn’t get to finish the thought, because Genichiro grabs his shoulder as he’s quickly moving out of the room, gripping him tightly to stop him before he can speak. But he doesn’t gripe about being left with the puke-stained blankets, doesn’t push the issue of earlier that night, doesn’t make some sarcastic comment about why Wolf would bother trusting him alone in a room with his ward, after everything. Instead, he nods towards the empty hammock.

“She was feeling ill, earlier. Not seasick, though. Something else.”

Wolf shivers, shrugs the hand on his shoulder off, and goes.

The hallway is dark – he’s gotten less sleep in his life, but it’s definitely late – but the door to the lavatory at the end is still closed. He knocks, and is repaid with a sharp gasp from the other side of the wood.

She’s still in there.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I do not know.” Her voice is thin and pained, and he knows it must be bad if he can hear it in her words, because among the lot, Wolf knows that the two of them almost certainly have the highest pain tolerance, and sometimes he wonders if he really _does_ have her beat. “Something, I think.”

“Should I… would you prefer that I get Emma?”

He realizes, then, that she must have avoided mentioning anything for fear of what it might elicit. The girl does not have a good history with medicine as a practice.

Or, perhaps, quite simply, she did not wish to bother anybody.

His face burns, because now _he_ sounds like-

“I’ll go get Emma,” he says, and then he does.

***

Traveling through the mainland is much easier, Wolf learns, though the journey is long.

Kuro was well educated in Hirata, can translate for the rest of them as they travel, though own his language is painfully formal. Wolf helps him in the port, as does Genichiro. A shinobi, after all, must know enough to understand should any travelers pass through, and language is likewise a matter of security to a general. As they travel deeper, though, it becomes more difficult to assist, and they are met with the occasional confused glance and awkward, incomprehensible explanation on Kuro’s part.

But the Divine Child, still nameless, for she will not take Yao’s, has a bearing for them, once they make headway. Still west, but south, too, it seems. It takes time.

They go from Ningbo to Chengdu, and then turn southwest properly. But after several months’ journey through the mainland, the dialects change again and again, and the familiarity of picking up an occasional word is eventually lost.

Kuro translates the newest one, too. But to her own surprise, and subsequently the others’, the Divine Child understands as well.

They stop along the way to take the occasional odd job. Emma tends to wounds and illnesses in the villages they pass through for whatever the locals can afford to pay, for they need food and shelter as well, and there’s always work for physicians. All three of them do physical labor for coin, when need be.

They do not speak about that night on the boat. Whether it’s out of constant proximity to very observant children or some reluctance to finally break the fragile peace they have between the lot of them, Wolf cannot tell. It’s all too easy for him to stow away whatever that was for the time being, to tuck it into the far corners of his mind with scarcely a second thought.

He’s had plenty of practice at not thinking about things he doesn’t want to deal with.

And so, the group presses on, as they always have, until they can see mountains rise in the distance.

They are getting close, to whatever will come of this.

***

It happens when they are holed up in an abandoned building along a mountain stream.

The weather is pleasantly warm, the early evening breeze a comforting sensation, and the trees around the old structure are spaced widely enough that they give Wolf pause, because it’s then that he realizes:

They have not had enough practice, of late. The journey has been ( _blessedly,_ he thinks) rather quiet after their uneasy departure from Japan.

A half hour later, the children watch as Wolf and Emma spar. Emma, he learns, fights with quick light steps – a cautious but deceptively powerful stance, and has made something beautifully new of the Ashina fighting style he’d seen so many swordsmen utilize back in the castle. She can close the distance to him with a speed that rivals some throwing knives, turning momentum into power like it’s almost effortless for her.

But she is unused to Shinobi tricks, and he’s been taught many. He pulls back, striking with a modified shadowrush, and she dodges it, but almost not quickly enough – the edge of her sleeve catches on the side of his blade, fraying slightly.

Wolf lowers his sword, nodding. “You’ve got good form.”

“I’ve not seen something quite that dramatic, before,” Emma breathes, sheathing her own blade.

“Useful when you’re trapped between two enemies. Good for following up with another strike from the air. I could-

He pauses, still catching his breath. “If you want, I could teach you. I’m not really certain what use you’d have for it, in your own style. And I can’t speak to my skill at training others in combat.”

Emma shakes her head. “Don’t worry on my account. Maybe we should switch from blades, though,” she says, with a pointed look towards her sleeve and a strange sort of smile that still confounds him even now. “Less of a chance that I’ll have to sew something up that isn’t fabric.”

He nods, and the pair of them forsake their weapons for hand-to-hand combat. Without blades, Wolf knows he holds a greater weight advantage, though they’re well matched in terms of trained skill. But, although Wolf is fast, Emma’s faster _._ He goes for a leaping strike but it never connects, because Emma grabs him tightly by the forearms, uses his own momentum against him to twist him over her head so she can slam him down hard against the mossy dirt.

It’s strange, to spar in this way, with someone for whom it’s not always a contest – to go simple bouts for the sake of practice without disappointment at his failures or some driving pressure towards winning. They swap victories as they learn each other’s fighting style. The children watch, enthralled and slightly pained when a strong blow connects, smiling in turn at each of them.

Genichiro watches too, eyes trained on the both of them in thoughtful concentration as they deflect and dodge blows.

They pull back after the fifth full set when he speaks, his voice, Wolf notices, rough and slightly tentative, as if he’s uncertain whether he’ll get the answer he wants.

“Would you be open to a rematch?”

Wolf raises his eyebrows. Why now? Why the uncertainty?

He can see Kuro’s eyes flicker nervously between them, and Genichiro catches it too, because he musters a thin smile, rubbing the edge of his nose between his fingers. “A _civil_ one, this time, I promise.”

The offer is tempting, and Wolf cannot help but oblige him. Fighting to the death allows little time to notice small details about one’s opponent’s style of combat that do not pertain to survival, and besides, it itches at him too, the way he can tell it does Genichiro – to know what it would be like to fight the young general on fair footing, with neither recovering from six months of imprisonment and wasting away, nor unhealing wounds. A test of strength unimpeded on either side.

He gives a slow nod, unsheathing his blade. Emma, in turn, gives Wolf an extremely pointed look. “It would be nice if we didn’t have to burn through everything we traded for in the last village in one night.”

Genichiro walks over to take her place in their makeshift training area, taps her lightly on the shoulder with his off-hand. “I expect there’s at least honor enough in one of us to yield, when beaten.”

It’s a far different fight from those with Emma. The two of them know each other already – he can read the small tells in Genichiro’s movements, knows his preference for quick flurries of slashes instead of the standard Ashina practice. He fights, Wolf comes to realize, in a style that mimics the Okami of Fountainhead, though perhaps unknowingly – dance like movements, quick repeated strikes, even without a bow in his hands – but only now do the similarities truly strike him.

He wonders if Isshin ever taught the boy to hold a blade.

The match ultimately goes to him, in the end, as Genichiro is forced to concede at the point of a sword, bruised and sweaty and, to his credit, only a little visibly frustrated, and with Wolf not much better off himself.

It doesn’t truly surprise either of them, in the end. Genichiro is built for archery, and though he is good with a blade, Wolf’s training was far crueler.

They carry on for a little longer – hand-to-hand, at Emma’s reminder of their limited capacity to treat serious wounds – not more than a couple additional matches. Both of them would have undoubtedly gone for longer, he’d trained full days before and the general had barely warmed up, it’s just that-

Kuro interrupts. Asks, as Genichiro has him in a headlock he’s about to sucker-punch him out of, if Wolf wouldn’t be averse to teaching him how to use a sword.

The sucker-punch becomes unnecessary, because the pair both flinch out of the hold.

He tries to keep his voice as calm as possible, but is firm in his response. “No.”

But he knows that look, and it frustrates him now more than ever that _this_ is what Kuro has fixated on in this moment, because the boy is extremely determined when he wants to be, when he thinks he’s right. He turns towards Wolf, eyes dead-set, and very calmly explains, “I do not _want_ to use one, please don’t misunderstand me, Wolf, but I would like to know how, in case it becomes necessary.” Kuro’s eyes flicker towards Genichiro, then towards the ground. “It would have been useful, in Ashina.”

“I will _not_ ,” Wolf responds through gritted teeth “ _permit_ it to be necessary.”

And because everyone suddenly stares at him, he adds, “I’m going to,” he pauses, mumbling, “go scout around. Or something.”

He can still hear and see them through the trees, after he’s stomped off to get a little space, grappled up one of them to get a vantage on the area, to clear his head.

A shared look flickers between the other adults, who glance solemnly – guiltily in the general’s case, which is _good, damn him for it –_ towards Kuro. Wolf can just make out Kuro’s soft insistence that he _is_ right, about Ashina.

At least he has the sense to stare down the other man, even if he looks sad about it.

He can hear Emma, too, as she sits down at Kuro’s side and replies with half of a thought that Wolf himself couldn’t quite give voice to.

“But he does not want you to be.”

He does not want Kuro to be right, on so many fronts. He does not want his failure to protect the boy to be a failure of training. He does not want him to have to rely on blades and blood for survival. He does not want to imagine what would have happened to Kuro had he chosen to fight back tooth and nail to the death, like he almost had as a boy.

He does not want him to be right. Not about this.

***

Rice, she realizes, as they push further west, further south, is popular here too.

True rice, of course – not the false parody of the divine waters, but sustaining in its own right. She does not want it to be thus, but it is. How strange, for something so life-giving to have been twisted thus, in metaphors and blood and ill-intentions.

This rice, too, is red, slightly sticky, and cooks to a pale pink.

(She tries not to think about what used to spill from her palms, stained and staining. What was taken from them both, because even she has to eat.)

***

They’d purchased several bottles of a local rice wine in the most recent village they passed through, for it was quite cheap, particularly after Emma took a look at the leg of the woman who sold it to them.

_Ara,_ Kuro calls it, and says the farmer mentioned it should be served hot.

Kuro is permitted a little to try, though the girl turns up her nose at it without even a sip. Wolf doesn’t entirely blame her – it’s exceedingly strong moonshine, rivals even the Monkey Booze he’d pilfered from the Sunken Valley.

The children sleep well here, in the mountain air, as the three of them take a brief moment to rest at a small wayside temple. The gentle snow reminds him of the illusory halls.

He rests his head against the slightly damp wood of the building’s wall, watching the wind carry small flurries through the trees, content to linger in a moment of warm peace. The others sit by his side, Genichiro humming softly as he fletches arrows-

“Shouldn’t you be doing that,” Wolf cuts in, “…sober?”

“I’ve made them since before my voice dropped, Sekiro,” Genichiro softly murmurs. “I don’t think a little rice wine is going to fuck them up badly enough that I can’t shoot us tomorrow’s dinner.”

He narrows his eyes, because he’s too far gone at this point to tell if the other man is serious and also, he doesn’t know enough about arrows.

Genichiro shakes his head, smiling slightly. He looks exhausted, but he’s always looked tired, and Wolf can’t imagine that any of them _don’t_ at this point. “I’m fucking with you a little. I’ll check them in the morning.”

And he places the now-finished arrow down with the rest, by his half-drunk rice wine, and turns to nudge Emma in the ribs gently with his elbow. She’d been fairly quiet for the past who knows how many minutes, hands curled around her own small bottle.

“You okay?” Genichiro softly asks.

Emma simply tilts her head, looking slowly – _sadly,_ Wolf notes, _something old and painful is in her mind –_ from Genichiro to Wolf, and whispers to them both, “Just thinking about something a little pointless, I suppose. Meaningless hypotheticals.”

Wolf nods, and catches a glint of understanding in Genichiro’s expression. Neither of them are strangers to such lines of thought. He’s not certain how the general feels about it, but he, like Emma, knows that it’s purposeless to want to go backwards.

Hypotheticals are how they ended up here, though, in the middle of the gods only know where, trying to fix this mess, instead of at least three of them – arguably four, and quite possibly, even _five_ – dead in a ditch or a temple or a silvergrass field somewhere in Ashina.

He’d thought about it, though – what if Owl wasn’t- no. Not going there right now.

“What…” Wolf mumbles out, “what’s on your mind?”

“I was just thinking,” Emma murmurs, expression slightly blank, a finger tracing the line of what Wolf has come to know as a _very_ old scar on her other palm, “about what might have happened if it was us, instead.”

“Us what?”

“On the battlefield,” Emma says, voice distant. “When we were younger. What if we’d met each other on the battlefield, instead?”

What she doesn’t say is that we would have starved together, burnt together, if it was where I was, but if I’d wandered towards you instead of Orangutan, maybe Isshin wouldn’t have come across me. I wouldn’t have had to spend my whole life preparing to kill the first person to show me kindness since my family died. Maybe we could have kept each other from the mistakes we made – from trusting too deeply, from not trusting enough, from being taken in and used and discarded and _killed_ like farm animals.

Genichiro, too, wonders. It would have been nice to not have been alone, after all. More bodies at my side would have meant friends, meant more manpower and a greater chance to survive. Maybe we could have lived in peace, though still miserable, but none of this would have happened.

Though, he thinks, maybe that wouldn’t have helped matters at all, in the end.

But Wolf does not indulge in such idle fantasies. Instead, he turns over the question in his mind like a hot iron, along with the countless others it brings up. Would you both have helped me kill them all, if you found me on that battlefield instead? Would I have turned the stolen blade on you, first? Would I have dragged you all down into an unhappy death with me?

And if Owl was there, he thinks, as he swallows, he would like as have made us fight for the honor of a paltry sum of rice and his patronage, so he could train the strongest.

Instead, Wolf says, “Nothing good would have come of that, I think.”

***

Their destination, it turns out, is a temple clinging to the side of one of the mountain peaks.

It is loosely occupied – a single monk keeps the place, tending to the small flags that fly in the trees around the building as well as his regular duties. The Divine Child speaks to him in a language that, as always, only Kuro understands, the moment he notices the group’s approach, hailing him and launching off into a spitfire of statements and seeming-questions.

He translates for Wolf and the others as she speaks – she’s explaining that they’ve come a long way, in order to return what was stolen. The Drukpa monk responds that he can prepare what is necessary, it will take a couple days, and leaves them, strangely, the run of the temple.

Both the Divine Child and Kuro offer to assist, on behalf of the group, but the monk simply shakes his head.

The rooms in the temple are small but cozy, and plentiful enough that they could, should they so choose, to each claim one. Kuro and the Divine Child, for the first time in ages, quietly and politely take delight in having their own space, though the emptiness is eerie in a way that reminds everyone uncomfortably of Senpou. But the mountain air is nice, and the view of the valley – trees and beautifully jagged cliffs, stretching on as far as he can see – is something Wolf can finally appreciate.

Perhaps it’s simply because they’ve made it.

But Wolf can feel the same old restless energy thrumming under his skin, because once it’s all said and done – putting aside what may come of _this_ – what is to come of them all?

What next?

He thinks of Owl’s heavy hand on his shoulder, the day he cut him down. Of Genichiro’s, the night on the ship. Of Emma’s, pleading, in the Abandoned Temple, as she begged him to reconsider following in Tomoe’s footsteps.

Of Kuro’s small hand in his, in the secret passage in the moat below Ashina Castle. Of the girl’s, excitedly pulling the both of them up the mountain but an hour before this.

Of the Sculptor’s, whose hand-

-is now his, he gave up this arm for him, bone and sinew gently carved and refined to be a tool for facilitating death, for enabling survival, for carving small spinning tops for children.

He flexes his prosthetic. He does not know how to be anything other than what he was made to be, does not know how to carve himself up and shape the raw matter into something different, not like how he was shaped. It smells overwhelmingly strong up here, and not of flowers. It smells like ozone and burnt skin and the heavy shift in humidity that precedes a strong rain.

And the others hover _, always_ hover around him, but the children have eyes and are remarkably perceptive (a skill necessary for survival, but divinity is uncanny and Kuro has always read deeper into his heart than anyone but _Owl_ but Owl _shaped it_ ) so how is he to know what will come of that, either, when they will not speak because of it? He _cares,_ so deeply it pulls at something within his soul both to feel and to admit it, but they have not had the time nor the privacy on this trek, not since that ill-fated night on the ship-

They haven’t pushed him, and he’s grateful for the space to think.

It’s just, a future like that feels so foreign, even now, even after everything, that it might as well be impossible.

And it was never an option, before.

***

The divine realm looks exactly the same – an endless expanse of storm clouds and blue sky above.

But the dragon is different.

Of course. He should have known.

Of course there would be _two_.

There were _always_ two, were there not? Everything seems to fall – _did_ fall – in accordance with twos. There was Orangutan, and there was him – both failed shinobi, both cut down for the sake of war, both struggling with anger and rage and the burning flames of hatred since the moment they first laid eyes upon a battlefield, but two very different sides of the same coin.

There was Isshin, and there was Owl. Two apes that guarded the flower in the Sunken Valley. Two Divine Children, who stand before him now. And there were _two_ great serpents, after all – not one.

He only took fresh viscera from one, for the other had long been-

-stolen. Lain to rest, dried and forgotten, in a temple deep below the Sunken Valley.

This dragon, like the other, is the same iridescent turquoise, scaled and coiling, with horns that curl back like the stray branches of a tree.

But unlike the other he once fought, whose tears he sought, the dragon before him is a _child._

The girl speaks first, gives the creature an introduction, an account of who they all are. An explanation, of what has already been done. Of what they are now attempting to do.

It pauses at her words, expressionless, unreadable.

And then it speaks.

“Why have you come?” it asks.

It looks to Kuro, first. “Why have _you_ come?”

Kuro bows softly, and answers, “Because I did not choose. I made no choice to inherit your power, for what was stolen was forced upon me by circumstance of birth. And even ignorant of its true origin, I would not keep it even so.”

The dragon tilts its head, and Kuro, indignant as ever, continues. “As soon as war broke out in Ashina, and I discovered the records of the last man to bear the blood I bore, I realized it was possible to sever the cycle of inheritance, and I made plans to see that to fruition well knowing it would require my death.”

He continues to explain his original plan, and Wolf is proud, in that moment. He has not seen that look on Kuro’s face – determined and contrary, and _tired_ of being questioned – since the day Owl died.

The dragon, seemingly satisfied with the information it had been given, turns then to Genichiro. “Why did _you_ come, then, if you would have stolen resurrective immortality yourself?”

“Because,” Genichiro says, voice bitter and low and _frustrated,_ and Wolf _cannot_ tell _with whom_ , “I did not understand the _cost._ ”

Kuro flinches at that, a quick, quiet motion. The dragon responds, nonplussed and skeptical. “For yourself, you mean.”

“No. I did not understand one simple fact – what was stolen from you was stolen from the people, and I would have stolen it from them, unknowing. What simulacrum I _did_ steal, what I used to survive to this point, stole only the remnants of humanity from myself, for a time. To answer your question, though: I would make amends. I came, initially, seeking new purpose, for there was nothing left for me there, in Ashina. I care deeply about my homeland, but can do little for it at this time, and yours – yours was wronged. I can, and _would_ , make that right.”

“What of _you_?” the dragon asks, as it turns towards Emma. “You have no oath, no ties, and no amends to make. Why would you come?”

Emma shrugs, sighs, and answers it gently. “It is because of that, I think. Countless wars have been fought. Many more orphans have been made. Lands have been scorched by meaningless flames of hatred, and people have starved and died over such aspirations, such things, and it is precisely because of this cyclical desire that I lost the ties I was born with, and many more besides.”

“I watched,” Emma pauses, and Wolf _knows_ her, she’s choosing her words very carefully here, “I watched Lady Tomoe die for even what would have been an imperfect resolution to this mad cycle, and because of that, along with everything else, I believe to do everything in my power to make this right is a very worthy goal indeed.”

“But,” she corrects it, “I did swear an oath– to fight Shura. And convoluted as the circumstances of that oath may have been, preventing the birth of such creatures _is_ a responsibility I feel compelled to stand by. And this return, I believe, is the best way to do that. By removing the source of the hunger for power that leads to violence, the stagnation that leads to death, then the hatred may quell, and the flames can die down for good.”

And then, it turns to Sekiro, to Wolf, and he can feel the fingers of his flesh arm nervously twitch for the hilt of his blade, because the look it is giving him is nothing short of _accusatory_.

“You,” it spits, like a corpse he cut down, risen back up to give him a piece of its mind, “have _benefitted_ , from this stolen not-a-gift. How _dare_ you face me?”

And he swallows, and answers, “Because he (and he points his chin towards Kuro) was coerced into using it to save my life by a man who would have it for himself, who’d already stolen a branch from a limb of the Everblossom freely given precisely _for_ that purpose. Because I owe him my loyalty, not because of any code or oath, but because he is an admirable and brave child, in a way that I was not, to face wicked men who would use him to advance their own ends and meet the edge of a blade to stop it from happening again.”

The dragon shakes its head, unconvinced. “You _did_ meet the edge of a blade for it. I do not believe you.”

Wolf faces it, and says very firmly, “Because it was a _curse.”_

He can hear the Divine Child swallow as he continues to speak, but he’s too angry, he hasn’t lost his temper since he was a boy, but anger is an emotion all the same and he’s got more than enough to spare that it just comes bubbling out all at once.

“And the burden of it was unfathomably heavy for me, but I never pretended to have carried it alone. I watched people bleed out their death rattle, even as I died, repeatedly, to return this to you. I watched _him_ ,” he points to Kuro, more sharply this time, “curl in on himself, weeping, _praying_ that I would deliver him death when he was brave enough to ask not because he wanted to die, but because this curse took the choice to _live_ from him too along with a will of his own and a family.”

“And I watched _her,_ ” he shouts, gesturing to Emma, “cut down the only man who was like a father to her, driven mad not by his own crimes, because he spent the remainder of his _life_ trying to atone for those and to keep others from the same mistakes, but by the collective, unfathomable grief of hundreds, of _thousands,_ as the inferno of war scorched the land again and again, until he could not bear it for a second longer. And still, she held the blade strong, and _then_ braced her leg and ignored all the burns and the pain and the horror and hobbled through the silvergrass fields to persuade an old friend not to throw himself on another’s sword for the sake of misled and unrecognized honor.”

He pauses, if only to breathe, and shrugs towards Genichiro. “And him, too. I watched him descend from a once-proud general to a desperate man seeking an edge, trying in vain to hold back the overwhelming tide of war, willing to lay not only his _life_ on the line, not just his body, but his _soul_ as well. And _still,_ I watched him pick up the pieces, surrender, and actually reconsider when confronted with the notion that to achieve what he sought would require playing with the lives of others.

None of us are thieves. We were taken and shaped and used, all of us, and not a single one of us wanted to see the cycle repeat itself a second or third time within what little life we had left, so we did what had to be done.”

The dragon sharply turns towards the girl, and he wasn’t _finished-_

“Why did you come,” it asks, “when they have caused _you_ such grief in particular?”

“Because,” she says quietly, “my grief is, in the scheme of things, less important than the life of another.”

“This is a good perspective,” the dragon says, thunder rumbling all around them, “because you will have to bear a little more of it.”

And it leans, towering over her, and with one smooth motion and an impossibly quick and large mouth, clamps its teeth around her torso, sinking into the flesh it finds there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Ara is, interestingly enough, believed to chemically ward off snakes. Hence, why the Divine Child doesn’t like it, and why I thought it was pertinent for it to be the catalyst for the “what if the whole second phase of immortality bullshit didn’t happen” question. Mostly, because if we're warding off snakes, you're looking at an absence of the Divine Dragon's influence, so... it kinda works, in a cool way. The game is pretty interesting when it comes to the link between alcohol types and conversation topics, and I wanted to play a little with that. 
> 
> 2) The temple of the Divine Dragon is *very* loosely based on Tiger’s Nest/Paro Taktsang Monastery. Theories for the Divine Dragon’s origin in the west sort of fall into three buckets – India, Tibet, and Bhutan. My decision to go with Bhutan for this fic is due to several reasons. The architecture of Senpou’s sanctum was one cue, but Bhutan, in Dzongkha, is called Druk Yul – the country quite literally defining itself by the name of the thunder dragon that's its national symbol. So Paro Taktsang, as sort of the most striking slash well known monastic structure, was definitely a solid visual inspiration, though this obviously is not intended to actually *be* Paro Taktsang. Also, interestingly, Paro Taktsang, in addition to the Drukpa lineage association, was consecrated for the purpose of taming a specific demon, so that also felt vaguely fitting.


	3. Chapter 3

She is alive.

But she is horribly injured.

Patching her up is a joint effort. They all help Emma as she directs them: boiling water, fetching supplies from her bag, passing her more thread and clean needles and vials of something strong-smelling for disinfectant. Kuro cannot stop crying even as he helps, and for once, none of them have any words of comfort to offer, because what is there to say?

She took this blow for him, after all, because the alternative was his death. 

Or, a voice needles in the back of Wolf’s head, _yours._

But though Kuro feels guilty, is visibly grief-stricken, all Wolf feels is numb. It’s a cold, dead feeling that settles in his bones and the back of his mind, like the strange not-feeling of the all too common phantom aches where his severed arm used to be, overlapping with the faint sensations of motion he gets from the prosthetic.

It’s only after Kuro takes a small leave at one point that Emma asks the others if they, too, suspect that the girl may have known. If she’d expected that this, or something like it, would happen.

Wolf cannot tell who the thought upsets the most – her or Genichiro.

Days pass. The last of the rejuvenating children remains unconscious. Kuro is impossible to convince that rest, on his part, is necessary, so Emma eventually capitulates and has him help her so she can at least keep an eye on him too. At least they can convince him to take breaks on occasion, though he, again, does not sleep: preferring instead to help the monk in the temple cook. 

Wolf does not sleep much either, but he’s no stranger to this. At least it allows him to take most of the vigils when Emma needs to rest.

He’s not sure why the others decide he’s less stubborn than Kuro, though.

One afternoon, as she’s checking careful stitches for any signs of infection, Emma turns to him and says, very gently, “She’s like you, you know.”

Wolf does not respond, does not look at Emma, does not look at the jagged wound across the girl’s torso. He stares down at the jagged cliffs below, the green-capped peaks bordering the valley, instead.

“Neither of you,” Emma says, “know how to be in pain.”

He just shakes his head. He does know. He’s had plenty of it.

But because it’s Emma, and, quite frankly, he loves her for it, she does not push the issue. “I do have things that can help you sleep, if it’s difficult right now.”

“I’ve managed before with worse,” he responds, quietly.

“There’s no reason for it to be as bad this time. Pain that might be avoided isn’t necessary. It isn’t something you have to bear, like a punishment.”

She leaves it at that when no response falls from his lips, working in silence. Wolf passes her herbs and clean cloths and cannot stop his exhausted mind from wandering between old memories and strange thoughts.

He thinks hard, on the strange rush of finally seeing her fight with no bloodshed as they sparred, on the strange feeling in his chest when Genichiro’s eyes lit up hopefully at the lightning in the sky on that one stormy day on their hike up here, on Isshin’s inane rambling and sake and Tomoe and-

Wolf cannot keep the question from slipping his lips, cannot keep himself from asking her how she could love somebody like him.

Emma’s hands stop in their tracks, dropping a small piece of something green on the wooden floorboards of the dusty porch, as if she’s not quite sure she’s heard correctly, as if the thought of _Wolf_ being the one to finally broach the subject never crossed her mind. “What if,” she murmurs slowly, “I asked the same of you and him?”

Wolf pauses. How can he? There is something about the other man. They are similar in their failures, too, and there is an understanding there, even though by all accounts they should each loathe the other for-

Honor. He is honorable, deep down, beneath the wanting and the crushing pressure of an entire country on his back, and at his lowest he made the choice to throw it all away for the sake of saving as many people as possible even at his own expense, and Wolf respects this, because he understands.

But Wolf does not know _how_ to love.

Emma clears her throat, and stares at him. “I look at you and see a caring man who had so many reasons to become the opposite, but nonetheless made the difficult and admirable decision to hold fast. I feel a kinship with that, in my own way. And I see that when I look at Genichiro as well.”

Wolf can see the same in her – the way she’s always made the difficult choice to hold the needle instead of the sword. The woman who looked at the man who took her whole life from her and did not hold the blame to his feet, who held him close as he died if only to take away the pain of what must have felt to him like a broken promise.

“You spoke well with the dragon,” Emma continues. “Perhaps what I find resonates the most among the three of us for me is that we all have had comparable experiences in how we were ultimately raised by people who sought only to train us for a particular purpose, though the circumstances vary, of course. It would be difficult for you, too, would it not? For you to be with somebody who did not understand you, in that?”

Wolf nods. It is hard enough for him to entertain the notion as is, even as it’s grown on him.

Emma nods in turn, and shakes her head, stifling a small, incredulous giggle. “Can you imagine me as somebody’s wife?

He absolutely cannot, and the thought is absurd enough that he has to bite back an amused noise of his own.

Boots hit heavy against creaking wooden floorboards as Genichiro exits the temple onto the small porch that serves as Emma’s makeshift clinic today. Emma greets him with a warm grin, a gentle nod. “No change, but,” she notes, “stability at this stage is not a bad thing. It means no infection, either.”

Wolf looks away from the landscape to watch the other man’s eyes trace the lines of the wound, the packed poultices and the discarded, stained bandages. Watches the line of Genichiro’s jaw clench uncomfortably, the frustration manifest in the corner of his lip as he swallows the anger instead of voicing it aloud.

Instead, he turns to Wolf, which surprises him, exhales heavily, and asks, “Would it be acceptable to you – I’ve been thinking about Kuro. If I taught him, perhaps, to shoot a bow for the sake of hunting rather than fighting? I only wonder if it would give him,” Genichiro shrugs, “and maybe, even, all of _us_ a little peace of mind. And it would keep him from moping around all day.”

The tone is well controlled and careful, like he’s been rolling the thought around in his head for ages. Like he’s intrigued by the prospect but unwilling to deal with the ramifications of rejection.

“I understand your reservations-”

“Only if I’m present,” Wolf interjects, cutting him off. There are uses for bows other than murder or killing.

“Genichiro,” Emma chimes in, her tired face lifted in a warm grin.

He smiles back at her. “Emma.”

“I have a request for you. Doctor’s orders.” Genichiro nods. Emma nudges her chin in Wolf’s direction, which- what?

“He needs to stop sitting vigil here and at least go relax somewhere else, if he isn’t going to listen to me and get some actual rest.”

Genichiro turns sharply towards him, incredulous. “Have you seriously not slept since the last time we were bothering you about this?”

Wolf sighs. “I’ve gone longer without sleep. But I did sleep, a little.”

Emma just shakes her head, rolling her eyes as she continues with the bandages. “An hour nap _does not count as actual sleep, Wolf-”_

There’s a snort from his left. “Alright, I have a couple ideas. Come on, you stubborn idiot.”

***

He half-expects Genichiro to lead him inside, to try and pin him to the wall, or maybe to the bed, force him to relax by finishing the job from months and months back that sparring brought to the forefront of his mind and held there, _pinned,_ like a constant irritation.

Instead, Genichiro leads him into the dense woodlands, slightly further down the mountainside, along a small trail towards the cliff’s edge.

“Where are we going?”

Ahead of him, the other man calls back as he ducks beneath a low branch. “Trust me, you’ll like it. Somewhere nice.”

The trail ultimately opens out into a partial clearing, where a beautiful red bridge has been built across a small stream that flows over the edge of the nearest cliff, down into a series of pools below. Beyond, the valley lies open and green and wonderfully uneven in its multitude of jagged peaks, some stretching high enough that the clouds obscure the snow-dusted tops. 

Wolf has to admit, it’s a nice spot.

Genichiro speaks first, leaning with both arms against the painted wood. “I’m not going to make you fucking sleep. You’re an adult. You can make your own shitty choices. But,” he pauses, voice slightly softer, “I’m not happy about it either.”

“If you were, I’d probably have to run you through again.”

“Funny. Good to know your deadpan sense of humor survived. But what I _was_ going to say is that it’s clear something is eating at you hard about this. And whatever it is, I can tell you don’t want to talk to Emma about it.”

Is he that easy to read?

“It just,” Wolf gesticulates blankly with his left hand, grasping at air, and gives to rub at his face when he realizes that’s not going to help. “It shouldn’t have been her.”

“Yeah. She’s not dead, though.”

“It bothers you too, though. That she was still willing to risk laying her life down like that, after everything.”

“It does. It bothers Emma, as well, and it clearly bothers your boy back there, because-”

“He would have done the same.” He grips the railing tight between tired fingers, can hear his voice shaking when he opens his mouth again. “I would have done the same.”

“In Ashina.” Genichiro does not say it like a question, but like he already knows the answer is yes, like he knows Wolf is talking about throwing himself before the mortal blade in the silvergrass fields so he doesn’t have to hold the knife himself and feel it sinking into the closest thing he still had to family-

Wolf nods.

“I wonder sometimes,” Genichiro murmurs, “whether we truly have cast off the shackles of the past. In ending the violence it feels like we’re just pulling each other off of pointless pyres, over and over.”

“I would have done it, willingly, if this was not presented as an option.”

“Purification?”

Wolf nods again, and Genichiro looks away from him, down at their hazy reflection in the stream below.

“Emma refused to tell me what she knew about it. I pressed her for the information, back in Ashina. If that had been the only way, I would have done it for Kuro, just as you would have fallen beneath the other mortal blade for the sake of your adoptive grandfather, once.”

“That’s exactly why she refused to tell you. She knows you’d have done anything for the boy, and even if we can all agree that immortality of _that_ kind had no place in Ashina, you would have done it without any regard for what you wanted, precisely because that was how you were brought up.”

“If that was the only way-”

“ _It doesn’t fucking work!”_ Genichiro snaps, voice cracking on the final syllable.

There is silence, then, for a moment. All is still, bar the water under the bridge and the gentle rustle of leaves scraping against each other in the breeze.

“It didn’t,” Genichiro says softly, though still pointed, still harsh, “work. Last time. There was no guarantee your death would have even done anything.”

“Tomoe didn’t have the mortal blade.”

“There would be no way for them to have returned to the Fountainhead, once they’d left, if they didn’t have one. She had grandfather’s. Open Gate. Emma saw her with it.”

Explains where Isshin got it from. It’s a curious thing, though, and before he even thinks the question through properly, he asks, “Did she use it often?”

Owl would have killed for something like that, once. How she kept it from him, had they met and he seen it, and Owl kept his life afterwards, is beyond him.

But it suddenly strikes him that this was the wrong question to ask, because he realizes that the only time that a younger Emma, training as a doctor and assassin both, cooped up in Ashina Castle and its dojo, could have _seen_ Tomoe wield such a weapon-

He tries again. “This is an ironic conversation.”

Genichiro gives him a blank sliver of a smile for that, tension visibly draining from his shoulders at the change in subject. “When are ours ever not?”

“You’re correct, though.”

“About what?”

“I’m tired of the meaningless sacrifice. I don’t want those two to grow up like we did, but I don’t want them to grow up having only learned that from us, either.”

“I’m not sure they’d learn too much from me that’s anything but fighting or grappling with mistakes. But you’re preaching to the choir there,” Genichiro says, rubbing at the scar on his neck. “I’m pretty sold on the pointlessness of that, after everything.”

Before he can stop himself, he’s reached for the hand at Genichiro’s neck. Emma stitched up his throat, back in Senpou, but the scar still traces the right side all the way down past his clavicle, where the double-edged blade split skin.

Genichiro’s hand is warm and rough. The scar is much smoother beneath the tips of his fingers, what little contact he makes with it. It’s still visible, but has healed remarkably well with exposure to air and light and adequate medical care, unlike some of the others on the both of them. Genichiro’s torso is still a patchwork mess, raised scars branching away from the puncture he’d inflicted, torn back open by hard stones and a month and a bit of overexertion, and Wolf?

He’d never given much thought, actually, to the fact that they match in this ugly way too. The both of them, pierced by a sword through the gut – what would have been a clean kill but for the miserable circumstances of immortality not sought for personal gain, but pushed onto them by the very people who held a blade to their back, to their throat. A webbing of burn scars, fire and lightning.

Genichiro watches him think, grips his hand gently when Wolf makes to remove it, moves Wolf’s hand further down to his stomach, presses it to where his blade once cut.

There’s a strange heat to his expression, a surprised fascination. His own hand is close enough to feel the shift of air when the other man speaks. “This is not you relaxing. This is just us being mired in shit as always, isn’t it.”

He exhales, gives Genichiro a nod of agreement. “I apologize. You can berate me for it later, but I truly have no idea how to relax. I have no idea how to do any of this.”

“You seem to be doing a halfway decent job so far.” Genichiro gestures with his chin back the way they came, towards the temple. “You’re good with them. And you got us this far, besides.”

“My father tried to kill me twice. And before that…” Wolf trails off. “I don’t have much in the way of positive examples of parenting.”

Genichiro raises his eyebrows. “And my grandfather left me to die when I outlived my utility. The only difference between us there is that mine didn’t give enough of a shit to wield the sword himself, when he felt it was ‘appropriate.’ Poor Emma had to kill _two_ of them for us.”

His voice is weak. “I did offer.”

“For someone who once gave me a whole speech about acting like a tool, you really have trouble letting go of that, don’t you?”

There’s no reason to deny it. “Yes.”

“You’ve got time.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he runs his fingers along the line of the scar through the thin fabric of Genichiro’s shirt, traces a couple interesting patterns he finds – raised lightning marks. 

“You don’t say much, when it’s just us.”

The unspoken presumption is that Emma is a buffer, that they have a history that the two of them have never fully quite worked through, that it’s going to be a slow and painful process to chip away at old wounds that have already been understood and somewhat forgiven by each of them but at the same time, they took _everything_ from each other.

Even if neither did so for their own sake.

What Wolf does not say is that he has always been bad at talking to people, ever since he was a child, before he crawled battlefields for broken swords and had any vestige of his former life beaten out of him with training weapons, before his life revolved around the protection of a single child with no distractions and the necessity of _learning_ how to do so was finally, blessedly removed. He does not say that Genichiro is harder to talk to because he has always been bad at parsing out thoughts, putting feelings into words, and the more complicated the necessary explanation, the more impossible the task.

He kicks himself for the explanation he does give, because it clarifies nothing.

“Too many thoughts.”

But Genichiro doesn’t press him for it, because after months together, trekking through foreign lands and up seemingly endless mountainsides, Wolf’s brand of reticence is practically second nature to him. “Like what?”

Wolf pauses. “I think,” he murmurs, “I see some of Tomoe in your eyes.”

How many times did they nearly kill each other, and yet Wolf is still drawn to this man, still marvels at the way he moves with a blade, a bow? It’s the closest he’s ever come to understanding any of the rambling that spilled from Isshin’s mouth, that one night they drunk together.

“You’re going to bring up,” Genichiro mutters, “Tomoe. The woman who taught me to fight. Closest person I had to a halfway-decent parent, after everything. While you’re touching me and staring at me like you can’t decide whether to fuck me or run.”

Wolf blinks.

“Also, I’m going to be honest, I have no idea what you meant by that. I think Emma really may have a solid point about sleep deprivation.”

He’s rambling now, deflecting, and Wolf can’t let that happen, because if they push this off, they won’t talk about it again. He’s had his time to make peace with it, and so has Genichiro, because he didn’t push him away, but it’s clear neither of them know what to _do_ with it.

Emma is easier. Emma is so much easier, to love. Genichiro brings up all the gritty, harsh uncertainty because he reminds Wolf so _much_ of himself in all the worst ways possible, and worse yet, forces him to acknowledge that some of what they share – what Wolf _is_ – is actually _admirable._

“How,” Wolf asks, staring at his hand, at their feet, at anywhere but Genichiro’s face, “did we get here?”

“Yeah, I mean, how did we? Because,” Genichiro mutters, and, Wolf has never been more reassured to hear that at least one of them isn’t entirely floundering in this, “I was trying to show you a neat spot to take your mind off of everything, and sure. Maybe I’d entertained the notion of picking up where we keep leaving off every time an immortal eleven-year-old walks by, but it seems like you beat me to the punch there, so the helm is yours, shinobi _._ ”

“I have no idea what I’m doing, _general,”_ he retorts, though the thinness of his tone is less from anger and far more from something different altogether.

“I mean, fuck, this is a bit off the wall for...” Genichiro pauses, reaching for Wolf’s other arm, and Wolf bites his lip, because that’s the prosthetic, he can feel it in the shoulder, where the motion pulls against the skin and muscle, and the gesture is unexpected and strange but feels weirdly nice.

“None of us clearly have any experience giving a shit about other people in anything other than a strictly professional sense.”

“I just,” Wolf murmurs, “I don’t know what to do with this. Any of it, but least of all, this.”

“Keep doing that,” Genichiro says, as Wolf traces the outline of another scar, follows the line of muscle it runs across. “Let’s… There’s a-” and suddenly Wolf is being pulled by the forearm, led towards the shade of a tree by the edge of the steam, and Genichiro presses him up against it, presses the weight of his _own_ body against him, hold’s Wolf’s hands to the planes of the scars on his chest, and kisses him.

Presses his lips to Wolf’s, over and over and it’s like a dam breaks, spilling sediment everywhere along with the flood, and it’s messy and desperate and far more emotion than Wolf’s ever felt from the touch of another person’s mouth other than the handful of Emma’s kisses that haunt him, but this is another beast entirely, because Wolf’s first thought is the sudden reminder that _oh, he does not kiss like Emma at all._

Genichiro kisses like he’s running out of time, like he’s running from something, like he’s tired of running, like he’ll find the answer to all of these things by catching Wolf’s unsteady breaths in the back of his throat.

Some pointless, wayward noise escapes him, but it’s lost in the tide of hands on his hips, a leg slotted between his own, the loss of the hands as Wolf tugs at the hem of the shirt his own fingers were tangled in and it’s lifted from his grasp, the buzz of nerves under his palms as he runs them along bare skin.

It’s when he reaches with his other hand to steady himself on the small of the other man’s back, digging his nails in, that Genichiro groans into his mouth. The sound hits something deep in his own chest, and _fuck,_ it’s too hard to overthink this. He’s too tired – any lingering guilt he still felt about even wanting to _be_ here, doing this, while this week was such a mess goes up like a plume of smoke at that noise.

What he tells Emma much, much later, when she asks: they fumble like idiots by the mountain stream. It’s very nice, and they both probably should have done it sooner.

What actually happens is, in between realizing he can get Genichiro to make all kinds of noises like that by tugging at the roots of his hair, he loses his own shirt, can feel himself shudder at the feeling of bark scraping against his bare skin on top of everything else, caught between that and the warm body in front of him. And he tries to reach his hand for the other man, to slip it below the waistband of his pants, because what they’re doing feels _fantastic_ but he wants to feel him properly, but-

-But Genichiro catches his wrist in his hand, hips still stuttering against his own, and pulls back from his mouth long enough to say, “ _let me.”_

And he waits at a hair’s distance for an answer, but Wolf can’t assent to that, because, “I killed you. Let _me._ ”

Genichiro pulls away entirely at that. “I am _not_ playing this game with you. We can just- _fuck,_ ” his voice tapers off into an incomprehensible sound, something between a keen and a whine, as Wolf grinds a knee between his legs, “just… something mutual, whatever, get it out of our systems and _then_ touch those subjects with a ten-foot pole, _shit.”_

Luckily, he interprets Wolf’s noise correctly as a sound of agreement.

Then they properly fumble like idiots, rutting against each other in the middle of a forest, and Wolf has felt him channel lightning before, has turned it back against him with his blade, but this is altogether different.

Feeling untethered is the same, though.

He’s not sure who comes apart first, but his whole body feels like it’s floating, like he just threw off a heavy weight and now there’s nothing to keep him grounded.

It feels good this time, Wolf decides.

They sit there awhile, in the shade of the same tree that they then slump down against, watch the morning fog creep up out of the valleys down below as they catch their breath.

Eventually, the silence is broken by an amused sound from his left side. He gives Genichiro a look, and is in turn rewarded with a shit-eating grin.

“So... did you relax?”

Wolf snorts, and they begrudgingly crawl back to the temple after washing up and admitting that maybe Emma had a point, and was right besides, for getting them to pull their heads out of their asses.

Maybe there’s hope for all of them, yet.

***

“You’re turning your waist again. Hold.”

The boy before him begrudgingly lowers the bow, glaring at the last arrow to hit the dirt, scraping across the ground about five feet to the right of the small target they’d set up.

“Look,” Genichiro says, “nothing else should be moving besides your arms, eyes, and head. Your back needs to be straight, and _not turning with the shot,_ or else your arrow will turn with it.”

“I’m gaining a new appreciation,” Kuro grits out, “for the strength required to keep this thing still while firing.”

Genichiro can’t help but crack a small smile at that. “You don’t have to take to everything immediately, Divine Heir.”

“I told you to stop calling me that, _General._ ”

It’s hard to forget that the boy was raised much like a prince when he sees how soft-hearted he is, how he frets over his unlucky counterpart, how he can’t figure out how to hold the string steady, anchor his arrows consistently, with uncalloused hands that have until now only touched weaponry to push blades from his face.

It’s hard to remember, until he sees the boy flinch as the title escapes his lips, that he knows all of this. That it eats away at him, too.

(It’s hard to forget that the man before him was raised as a soldier, killed perhaps even more than the rot his own blood left in its wake, when he watches him hit the target in a clean, effortless shot.

It’s hard to remember, until he sees the dawning horror on his face as the words escape his lips, that the man was pulled from the battlefield as a child, was given a blade and a bow and a deathwish only because of the blood that flows through his own veins. That for all his crimes, for his ceaseless yearning and treatment of Wolf and imprisonment of them both, unlike the others who did so, he respected a temporary refusal. That he did not lay a large hand on his shoulder, demand he concede, and kill his own family for it.)

“I apologize.” He’s old enough to remember, to know better, to throw aside old grudges. There’s no more excuses for thoughtlessness.

He runs the boy through several more sets of attempts and basic corrections. Kuro’s follow through is quite good for a beginner, his concentration better, which doesn’t surprise him too much. He’ll be a good shot, once he’s better conditioned, built the requisite strength to actually wield the weapon properly.

Other than the occasional question, Kuro is not talkative, which also doesn’t surprise Genichiro, given everything that’s happened up here.

The other Divine Child is still not awake, after all.

They pick arrows out of the dirt, and a couple off the post he’d set in the ground, and he shows Kuro which ones will be salvageable and which they’ll just have to take the arrowhead off and set on a new shaft.

It might be a good idea to train Kuro on that before they do any more actual firing, now that he thinks of it. The boy would probably be better at that kind of meticulous work. Besides, it’ll give him something to do that’ll feel more immediately productive.

Another handful of arrows, these ones mostly unbroken, is pressed into his palm.

“I’ve counted. I think this is it.” He can’t tell if the boy’s face is more frustrated or numb, and a small stupid piece of him points out that Wolf has worn the same expression ninety percent of the time this week.

_Shut up,_ Genichiro thinks, nods, and gestures them back towards the temple.

But Kuro does not move. Instead, he stares pointedly at Genichiro, opens his mouth as if to speak, and presses his lips tightly together, as if he cannot quite-

“Go on. Spit it out, then.” He’s not sure what it’ll be this time. He does not want to rehash Ashina again with this boy, they’d spoken about it plenty while they were trekking across the damn continent.

“If you,” Kuro pauses again, eyes flickering to a point below Genichiro’s face, which-

- _oh._ Fuck _._ It’s his neck.

“Genichiro, if you hurt him again-”

“Please spare me the shovel talk.” He does not want to deal with having to defend himself to a child in this.

Kuro sighs, a deep huff. “There is no shovel talk. I’m not foolish enough to pretend that I have the capacity to do anything in retaliation, if you were to do that. But what I do want to point out is that if you hurt him-”

“-you know he’s almost certainly listening to this conversation, right?” Because Wolf insisted on supervising these little lessons. He’d done so in person the first time, and seemed content enough to let them continue without his physical presence, but neither of them are fools enough to expect him not to be lingering among the trees somewhere-

“If he is, then it would be _his_ fault if he hears things he does not want to. And he really ought to listen to me more often when I point out that he does not care about people lightly. But Genichiro,” Kuro reiterates, “if you hurt him, he would not take it lightly either. Since I have met him, he’s permitted himself a handful of friends – all of them in Ashina, and all only after I was taken there. All of them are now dead, but for you and Emma. For Wolf to permit himself this means he cares a great deal for you both. Please respect that.”

He almost says – have I given you reason to believe otherwise? But, Genichiro realizes, he _has,_ all too often. And this is nothing new to him, the man is not social, he’s well aware of that fact.

“It took far too long for me to convince him of the value of his own life, separate from his capacity to lay it down for my own. I do not know how long whatever is between you all has been going on, but I would ask of you – be mindful of this, please. I’ve already spoken with Emma about it.”

He’d seen the boy scared, before, but this is a different kind of fear. Something far more selfless.

He’d seen it in Emma’s eyes, too, in the silvergrass fields. In the young girl’s, as she passed him a cloth to wipe the remnants of bloody sediment from his mouth.

“I already am. And for what it’s worth,” he says, as he leads Kuro towards the temple, unsure why he’s suddenly so concerned with reassuring _him,_ of all people, “he is not the only one.”

***

She wakes as herself again for the first time since Senpou, the first time she can truly _remember_.

And she feels hopelessly lost in it.

The wounds, a sprawling trail neatly secured in stitches that trace her abdomen, ache with a deep burning. But it is not the worst pain she has ever felt.

Sekiro is the only one present, sitting in a small chair in the corner of the bedroom, face illuminated by the gentle light of the early morning sun peeking through the window. His eyes blink open as she gingerly moves, testing her muscles, and then attempts to haul herself up to a sitting position with the aid of a bedpost.

She’s known the man for at least a year now – perhaps longer, given everything in Ashina, and she’s never much bothered to mark time, but now a piece of her wishes she did – but she has never, until this moment, seen him genuinely smile.

Sekiro’s smile is warm, and the care it expresses cuts deep, because to see the man she once thought would cut her down, eyes bleary with lack of sleep, keeping guard over her as she herself slept, _concerned,_ when he had no obligation-

“How long was I…” Her question trails off into nothingness, because she herself is not certain. She did not dream, but the subtle rings around his eyes suggest it was more than a day.

“A little over a week.” Sekiro nods as he speaks, and she does not know who he is attempting to reassure more. “You were not fully comatose – there were moments where you did stir. Emma felt it best not to try and wake you prematurely, so you could be spared the worst of the pain.”

“I must thank her, then.” She gingerly moves her legs. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of the pain is relegated to her upper body. Sitting up was the worst part – and, though Sekiro moves to assist her as she rises properly, standing is much easier, as long as she does not twist too much.

“Emma instructed me to inform you that you should not overdo it, if you woke while she was sleeping.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I’ve disregarded advice like that at least four times from Emma alone. As such, it’s slightly ironic, coming from me. I trust, as Emma does, that you know your own limits.”

She smiles, still slightly unsteady. He allows her to grab his forearm when she shakes on the third step. “You understand, while I respect and am fond of Emma, that I prefer to measure my own capacity, rather than subject myself entirely to the whims of physicians, after everything. Even good ones.”

Sekiro nods. “Do what you will. But we were worried about you, and are here to aid you, if you need assistance or require something for the pain.”

“How are the others?” Sekiro’s presence, all things considered, is reassuring. If the dragon chose to enact any kind of vengeance, she would expect him to bear the brunt of it.

Or Genichiro. Kuro even, which is why she asked-

“They have been on edge ever since, as was I. Kuro, in particular, did not take you taking such a blow well. Were you aware,” Sekiro asks quietly, voice barely above an uneasy murmur, “that this was a possibility?”

She shrugs, biting back the pain when the small motion pulls at the stitches. “You read the same texts I did. I knew only that a cradle was required.”

“But if you had died, that was a risk you decided was worthwhile.”

Staring down at her hand, she realizes how battle-worn the carved prosthetic she clings to truly is. The lines of bone are notched with small chips – sword-marks, nearly-missed arrowheads, scrapes where he’s reattached tools at a speed that held little regard for the port he was connecting them to. Her fingers trace a small gouge in the structure. A monkey’s claws, undoubtedly. “Had you not made the same choice, Sekiro?”

But to his credit, Sekiro nods without pause, and she lets out a breath she did not know she’d been holding. Face solemn, he says softly, “I would not wish the necessity of such a decision onto either of you two.”

She shakes her head. “Kuro could not escape his… being forced into some decision. My burden of immortality was likewise forced upon me. As such, I had no choice in the responsibility of weighing,” she stumbles, catching herself again on his arm, “my options, once the information was provided. A decision was necessary. We agreed more death was unnecessary. I did not intend to die for him, but better the possibility than absolute certainty at the end of the same sword I thought would spell my end, when first you picked it up.”

They’d brought the blades with them, out of Ashina, away from the Ministry. Open Gate was known well enough, Emma and Genichiro pointed out, in Ashina Castle that the Ministry most likely was aware of what it could do. Better to bring weapons they could not use than allow others to carve others up with them, throw their own lives away for the sake of the power they might offer.

“I do not disagree,” Sekiro says, as she slowly loosens her grip on his arm, moves with unsteady steps around the room, still shaky, but newly confident. “But what I am trying to say is, we did not want you to die either. It would have been devastating. You and I do not have the same history as I do with Lord Kuro, but I cannot help but feel I owe it to you – and to your friends in Senpou – to do what I can for you. So please,” he asks, “permit me concern, for your wellbeing.”

She looks to the small pile on the floor by the chair – a series of old prosthetic attachments, a small polishing rag, and a small container of weapon oil. He’d not slept, she realizes.

Sekiro notices her staring, and says “I did not keep them all. Some have significance to me, and to others.”

She nods. There is a beautifully polished axe, loaded onto a spring, and-

“Is that a finger?”

One of them is a detachable slender finger affixed to straps of leather, with several holes bored into the small bone clean through the sides. A too-large ring sits partway down its base, polished and glazed wood, engraved with tiny letters that spell out ‘Kingfisher.’

Sekiro nods, and reaches for it. He swaps it out with the index finger of his prosthesis with a practiced motion and several quick clicking noises, and stares at her as he raises the curled appendage to his lips.

The whistle is akin to a somber melody. It is beautiful, to be sure, but the sound it produces can only be described as extremely lonely in its beauty. Nonetheless, it is enchanting to hear.

“Did you use that to signal Kuro?” she asks. What other purpose it could have, in the field of battle? Perhaps useful as a mild distraction, but not if the sound could not be thrown-

But Sekiro shakes his head. “Drawing enemies in, occasionally. Mostly to distract beasts.” She furrows her eyebrows, and he continues, attempting to explain. “An old Shinobi technique. Anything larger than a bird, the sound drives them mad. Enough so that they won’t concern themselves with you. Though the ring is…”

Sekiro trails off, gesturing blankly. “Some apparitions. Spirits. It gives them pause.”

“Interesting. It’s a strangely beautiful sound.”

“I have little use for it these days, if you’d like the ring. There’s small holes in it, too, and your fingers are much smaller than mine. You could likely wear and use it as intended, without,” he lifts the finger, uncomfortably, “this.”

“But you’ve kept it all this time.”

“It did not feel right to discard it. To use it to play music would be a worthy new purpose.”

She takes the strange ring from him. It is a little too wide for comfortable jewelry, but Sekiro points out she can blow between the ring and the side of her finger, and her breath whistles strangely through the holes.

The next couple hours pass in comfortable solitude as she leaves Sekiro to return to his rest (or, well, begin it properly), sitting quietly outside, experimentally sounding the strange ring now wound around her own finger. She plays softly for the birds that make their homes in the trees nearby, watching the remainder of the sunrise, and tries very hard to imagine such music driving spirits and animals alike to madness.

Perhaps it’s the solemnity. There’s something of a melancholy quality to the tone that cuts deep to the soul, and the sensation is not entirely comfortable. Perhaps the object is haunted, or perhaps, more likely, the quality of the music it produces reminds them of something from their former lives.

Sekiro must have made mention of her being awake to Emma, because shortly after the sun is properly in the sky, both Emma and Genichiro in turn seek her out.

She does not see Kuro, however.

The temple is not overwhelmingly large, but he is not in his chambers, not in Sekiro’s, nor, thankfully, in conversation with the lone monk, who she would prefer to avoid as much as possible.

This leaves the woods, which she doubts, and the kitchen, which is currently filling the hallway with the smell of cooked rice.

He is making sweets again, gently forming little balls of red rice by the fire. Or, at least, he _was,_ until the old floorboards creak beneath her feet and he turns to see who’s standing in the hallway, and his breath catches in his throat as he puts down the rice.

“Nobody told me you were awake.” She can see the beginnings of tears forming – his eyes are wet, as he stares at her like the shadow of something, like he’s staring at a ghost, like she rose up out of the ground and walked in here.

It reminds her of the mournful expressions of the monkeys in Senpou.

She pulls out the chair across from his, and wordlessly motions for the bowl of unformed, sweetened rice. He nods, gently moves it between the pair of them, and together they make food in silence.

It is very strange to hold rice in her palms properly without the pain of the incision required to remove it from her blood, to reshape it into something solid.

But the silence, just like the rice, does not last forever. Kuro stops, a small ball halfway formed, and softly asks her if she’d ever thought about what she wants to do, after all this.

She simply shakes her head. She’d never given it much thought, and honestly, she’s not certain.

And Kuro nods, looks down at the rice, and says, “I think I’d like to do this.”

“You would do well. You’re better at cooking most things than the others.” Notoriously, for all Emma’s skill at mixing medications, her skill at the fire when they traveled was abhorrent. Sekiro may even have been worse – not that he couldn’t cook, because he _could,_ sort of, or at least, what he managed out of their rations was palatable at times, but he had the unfortunate habit of not caring whether food _was_ palatable. That man would eat anything, and she knows it, because Kuro once told her he’d caught him eating rice _raw_ once _._

“I simply… I was wondering if you had plans of your own because... it’s just, well,” Kuro fiddles with a stray piece of rice as he speaks, uncertain. “You’re the only one who’s ever truly _understood._ ”

And suddenly she understands.

Because while Sekiro and Emma and even _Genichiro,_ who’d coughed up the sediment in horrible, bloodied pieces over the weeks after she became the cradle for the severed immortality, even with Emma’s aid, who’d come the closest to understanding _her_ (though she’d never tell him such), all know on some level the burden they carry, it isn’t the same as living the reality of _being_ the Divine Child. Of being the source of desire, of hatred, of the stagnation and pain and utter self-loathing.

And Kuro says, “You feel like family.”

And her heart, it breaks.

The other children of the waters were never divine, never truly immortal in all of its falsehoods. Now neither is Kuro, and neither is she. But for the first time in years and years and _years,_ to have a friend who understands the burden, who feels something like family?

To think, she used to hate him for what he stood for.

***

She asks Sekiro if Kingfisher was another shinobi.

He nods, but he does not tell her a story.

Instead, he raises the issue of her name again. Says he will never train her as one, will not teach her to wield a blade, but says there is a virtue in choosing one’s own name as they do.

She asks why he was called Wolf, then.

He leans against the tree she has chosen to sit beneath. “The man who raised and trained me told me I had the eyes of a starving wolf, when I first met him. The name Wolf stuck after that.”

“Why Kingfisher, then?”

“I know little of her, but that she was small, lived in the Sunken Valley, and was dear to an old friend. I suspect, if anything, her size combined with the bird-like sound of the technique she preferred to use. And,” he grimaces, “a mixed affinity for monkeys.”

“Monkeys?”

“She fought beside Orangutan – Bounding Monkey of the Sunken Valley.”

“I am not taking any sort of name related to snakes,” she says, turning back to the whistling ring as Wolf turns towards Emma, beckoning him over, and presses a kiss to the side of her head as he sits by her to answer whatever question she presumably has for him.

But birdsong rings throughout the mountainside, and the music that leaves her lips mingles alongside it, like it belongs there.

Kingfisher, it cries. _Kingfisher._

***

Somewhere in Punakha, a strange family from the east dwells. Some say they were displaced by upheaval and war, though they claim the journey that took them here was a pilgrimage of sorts.

A skilled doctor tends to patients who need her, though she takes no apprentice, for she’s brought her own with her – a man who takes to the work quickly, though his scars speak to the newness of his profession, the existence of a former.

A young man and his father, for that’s what he’s alike to, really, run a small bakery, cooking local and foreign sweets alike. A young girl, too, but she spends most of her days (when not helping her brother) up trees, playing strange and solemn music. The monks steer clear of her and the whistling birdsong she was named for, for they can hear something in it that unnerves them, even though most who walk that street listen for her with attentive delight.

The baker is a kind man, they say. The doctor saved him too, he says to the children she treats, pointing to his prosthetic arm, where he’s found a way to attach a small carving knife to the wrist, to let him more easily whittle down pieces of wood into spinning tops.

But they do not dwell in Punakha forever.

War, as it always does, one day subsides. Not too long afterwards, the family sets off into the sunset, leaving their newfound friends with quiet goodbyes. None know, really, where they are going.

But where they do go, they go _together_ , well-stocked with supplies from their one-time home, and well-laden with the sweetened balls of sticky rice the bakery was known for.

They eat together as they walk.

The rice is, like always, astoundingly delicious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why Kingfisher? Well, she was a small woman who had an extremely complicated relationship to monkeys (which fits the Divine Child to a T) and to the mourning and grief of her own pain. I always found it fascinating that you can only *get* the Malcontent's Ring after properly avenging her against the ape, and even *then* do you have to deal with her grieving spirit. Like the Sculptor, Kingfisher does not process grief well, and it resonates very well with the quasi-Shura we do see in the game. But, ironically enough, Kingfisher's legacy - which you can only get if you help her spirit move on - can be used to remind the Sculptor of who he once was, and stop that wrath and grief and fury in its tracks. As such, it made a lot of sense to me for a namesake for the Divine Child in this fic, because she really does struggle to an extent with the decisions Return requires from her, even as that ending is the only one where we see her slowly move towards peace.
> 
> So, when I was thinking of what she'd want to do after the return was complete, and I initially came up with apprenticing Emma, it... didn't fit. But grieving loss through music? Getting to be a child again, properly, while still maintaining that aspect of her presence that feels strangely haunting? Felt like the pieces finally clicked.
> 
> Also, really, I cannot repeat enough, shoutout to the person who left such absolutely incredibly thoughtful comments left on the first piece that I sat down and was like "you know what? i'm going to finish this self-indulgent monstrosity." And then I actually did it.


End file.
